Wandering a Wooded Trail

When the spirit leads me to wander

a wooded trail, the poet’s road less traveled

to clear my head, I take to an old farm road

once traversed by horse teams hauling in

and hauling out, a road long since grown over

and returned to a wildness crossed by hikers,

their northward trek from Georgia, or south from Maine.

The old farm itself, though, yesterday’s progress

and prosperity, is gone, spent and gone to ruin,

nothing left but an old stone fence, fallen and crumbled

into bouldered heaps hidden among the undergrowth,

over grown, no longer holding back cattle or kine,

nor kin; and the farm’s foundation, the old family home,

is reduced to a cellar-hole, filled in and sunken,

leaving barely an impression seen in passing -

nature reclaiming her own, as nature does,

in time, and in time reclaiming us all.