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)
|
