portent

I recall
its intensity -
my wind-blown
autumn wheat field
  a child’s first home,
an endless sky
and my cloud companions.
The road leads somewhere I haven’t yet been -
an occasional wanderer with
imagined news from Rome,
Carthage, Yorktown,
grand adventures and fame of
someday’s adulthood imagined
like orange-and-black butterflies
against the swaying stalks,
closeness and distance
a child’s imaginative dance.

Stay out of the woods,
there are wolves there,
they follow the hillsides,
a carpet of pawprints
with sinister purpose,
  turning the page
past shadowed and sun-splashed
slats of the barn,
with tin-roof holes
like stars from the inside
we hide behind haybales and
forgotten tools with the slumbering rust.
  Geese travel in Vees in the North Wind,
and with the sun settling
like granddad in his chair -
comes the first hoot of an owl. 


© Jonathan Bohrn (2004)


Sunset over the Barn
Oil painting by
Rose Kapka

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