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Between every dawn and dusk
I wander the country roads.
Out among the wind walls of trees
and the unborn fields.
Past knoll and dike,
Steel windmill
and rippling farm pond.
No tumbleweed would meander here;
Amid the vacant corn rows.
Zigzagging aisles of the heartlands church.
Soaring winds curve off the hill tops,
Plummeting into the wrinkled valleys.
Resurgent sun beams break through the clouds,
Strafing the ground with light.
With empty space and empty roads,
Still as the breath of a ghost.
No spirit ever went with me;
Not through iron rusted thorns
or the elusive hymns of morning birds.
Thunder heads and grim clouds
Plume like a conjurer’s smoke.
The torrents heave and spill
Muddy road canals.
And the gale blusters,
Gnawing the lonely trees.
Time passes by,
Men shoot for deer.
Robins hunt for worms
And the crossroads grow bumpy once more.
I came upon one such intersection.
A ‘T’ for ‘Trouble’.
Decisions always are.
Lined parallel with a mossy wall,
That way divided my heart.
Which to choose:
The right, or the other right?
Neither seem
real.
I still yearn to glimpse the forgotten places
And the edge of the horizon.
So, no more roads for me.
If I followed either of them,
I think those lumbering spits
of dusted gravel
would probably stretch
to the end of the world,
and back again.
Peter Johnson is a tenth-grade
student at Maryville High School. |
