In its day, so I’ve been told by
those who thought
they knew, seemed to remember, it
was a stately home,
raised up from an arid and rocky
land, a farm home
with a porch that stretched across
the front,
a porch long ago abandoned and
falling into itself
in the absence of hobnail boots and
the bare feet
of children running in and out with
the slam
of a screen door banging, gone now,
too,
dropped from its hinges, or torn
free, ripped open
one last time, a family home gone
to ruin in their passing,
until the roof gave way, collapsing
into the basement
below with a groan bellowing loud,
faintly heard
in a town some miles away by a
people who’d forgotten it,
and them, and the town tore it
down, this home
where the ghosts and spirits of a
past time wandered,
as if it were still new and fresh,
freshly painted
and papered and lived in, the six
of them,
sitting down to dinner, heads bowed
in thanks for their lives,
and praying for rain and
prosperity, for their crops to grow,
making a go of farming there, as
they were, tilling the soil,
raising stock and chickens, seeking
self-sufficiency,
set apart from a world so changed
and different;
but now it’s gone, the rubble
carted away and burned,
the cellar hole filled in,
returning the land to weed and rush,
and the six gravestones set off
with a rusted iron chain,
are barely visible now in the
undergrowth growing over.
I wondered, wandering myself on a
late afternoon and stopping,
where do they live now, the spirits
of these six
left behind in dying, their lives
taken on a night
when an autumn moon shown down,
pale and orange, dark,
and drink and depression drove him
mad, screaming out,
cursing the empty
heavens and the barren land of a season passed;
where do they live now when there’s
no place left to go
but back to their graves, six
stones set apart,
overgrown and forgotten.
