I remember stopping, on my way
to my annual family reunion,
at my great grandparent's old farm
in Pennsylvania. Its walls, once host
to an earth breathing green
with abundance, now thin and shaky.
Its outline a trace of old memories
planted by my grandfather
and his siblings. Its bones stale
yet still fresh with stories hutched
in the mouths of graveyards.
This is the place I’m told,
where as a child, my father fell
from the barn’s second story platform
almost smashing his head open
like a Gallagher watermelon.
A place where the cold building, black and eerie,
across the street, swelled rushed fear
within my aunt’s lungs.
Here, labor tilled pride.
Smiles alighted hard working hands,
toiling in the earth’s anatomy
and not far off, still standing proud
in hard PA back roads, is Barney’s road
named for my great grandfather, back
when the Rearick name had pull,
people had respect and gave a damn.
Today, with the evaporation of time
holding back tangibility,
the barn’s heart and all its back roads
burn in slumber.
My thoughts, ransacked with antiquity,
can only imagine how the barn’s soft, tranquil voice
must have been –
its sound, once as visible as music
now just a simple stich in my family
history.