Six Stones Set Apart

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.