I am a deserted barn,
my cattle robbed from me,
My horses gone,
Light leaking in my sides, sun piercing my tin roof
Where it’s torn,
I am a deserted barn.
Dung’s still in my gutter;
It shrinks each year as side planks shrink,
Letting in more of the elements,
and flies.
Worried by termites, dung beetles,
Maggots and rats,
Visited by pigeons and owls and bats and hawks,
Unable to say who or what shall enter,
or what shall not,
I am a deserted barn.
I stand near Devil’s Lake,
A gray shape at the edge of a recent slough;
Starlings come to my peak,
Dirty, and perch there;
swallows light on bent
Lightning rods whose blue
Globes have gone to
A tenant’s son and his .22.
My door is torn.
It sags from rusted rails it once rolled upon,
Waiting for a wind to lift it loose;
Then a bigger wind will take out
My back wall.
But winter is what I fear,
when swallows and hawks
Abandon me, when insects and rodents retreat,
When starlings, like the last of bad thoughts, go off,
And nothing is left to fill me
Except reflections—
reflections, at noon,
From the cold cloak of snow and
Reflections, at night, from the reflected light of the moon.
“Prolegomena,” “Deserted Barn,” and “Hawk’s Nest” by Larry Woiwode were all previously published by North Dakota State University Press and are printed here with kind permission.
