Larry Schug
USA
Ghost Towns
Victim to tornado, the economy,
a highway re-routed
or just all the young folks moving on,
looking for something better,
any sun-baked little town
could end up dead and gone as
Kill Creek, Colorado,
Lonetree, North Dakota,
Boggy Depot, Oklahoma—
melted away like a pat of butter
out on the hot pancake plains,
disappeared into the prairie,
not even a lick of syrup left,
time and wind, bad luck or chance
having scoured the plate of any evidence
that anything at all had ever been here,
much less that these places ever fed anyone,
body or soul.
Setting the Table
As deer flies buzz around my head,
my first thought is to catch a couple
for a featherless little phoebe, eyes not yet open,
fallen from its nest beneath our house’s high eave,
miraculously landing in a flower pot.
Trying to keep it alive, we fed it flies,
poking them deep into its gaping beak
the way its mother would,
but the tiny bird died as we slept last night.
A day later, I still try to snatch flies out of mid air,
out of habit or forgetfulness,
perhaps some kind of denial,
the way a widow or the mother of a fallen soldier,
without thinking, sets a place at the table
for a loved one, gone.
It’s just the way we were meant to be,
this hanging on to each other,
this clinging to any little life that’s touched ours.
Copyright,
Larry Schug.
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