CATEGORY: GRASS VALLEY

Here is my own poem about the barns:

High over there
beyond those several states of hills
is a place I went back to in September.

I had known it in the honey days of childhood;
I had sung it down the visions of the years:
the waiting fields
the hungry earth,
wind washed wheat and summer fallow,
the sun warmed horses
still as boards
against the high board fence.
Seventy summers
seamed and centered
and set in slanting light.

It was the barn I remembered mostly–
that rock and board and batten
all space
high
open
continent.
And I climbed the shrunken ladder
through the knot hole shafts of sun dust
to stand where I had stood
many times ago
in that small space under the eaves
by the hay.

But it was smaller still
and when
on my knees I reached it
the hole that looked out on the orioles nest
was gone,
sealed up by hurrying hands,
and it was stuffy there.

It may have been “stuffy” in the reality of 1975, but the memory of 1935 is clear and bright and beautiful.  I am thankful for it every day of my life.