An Abandoned Farmhouse on a Forest Trail

By John Grey

Cramped rooms,
small windows,
grimy crumbling fireplace
and, in the attic,
old mattresses 
for children’s beds –
this wasn’t a house
of ease and comfort.

Cupboards tiny
in anticipation
of limited provisions,
a few rotted turnips
in a dank root cellar
fields given up to snow
and a barn tilted to one side –
no great expectation anywhere,
merely the signs 
of a limited survival.

Here in the New England
rock belt,
the land’s struck dumb
by thinning top soil,
an indifferent sun,
too much rain or too little,
bitter cold,
ice on the woodpile
and winds from the north.

But the forest has taken up
what was farmland
and, luah and green,
it has thrived.
Adventurers hike
where horses 
once pulled plows.
Families picnic,
hunker down on food
grown elsewhere.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.