The Farm House - a poem

The Farm House

belonged to my grandparents,
that is Carol and Charles Blackmore, on a formerly
dirt road in Ravenna, Michigan. It's borders
concentrated with pine trees, planted when my mother
as she remembers was a younger person, and now
like her grown up, flourishing, and products
of careful construction with strong roots
holding them together. The farm house is now
overrun with grass, when often, before in a time
past it was mowed constantly by my grandmother
on red riding lawnmower, a chore she took on

while her husband tended to farm house. On
occasions it is tended, but no longer as regularly,
and if you entered on driveway, on this day,
you would see great weeping willow dead,
decaying, dying, bent, and its mighty trunk
cracking under the weight of praise the lord
reaching branches, that now buckle when once
they were raised with an absolution of strength,
so that children could climb upon it with makeshift
footing and play and jump and chase each other

in games of hide and seek, and tag. Driveway
would circle about that mighty tree, to a point,
bringing you to house, and shed, on left side,
old barn on right, and mighty big barn further
to right side. If you go today, shed is gone, a flat pile
barely reminding how much work was to be done,
how much storage was needed for a days work.
In the yard is an old house, crumbled to ruins,

though when it was standing, from my vague memory,
it was always Gothic and terrifying, a shambled
mess still vertical, upright, towering. Firefighters
used it as practice, controlled flames, let it fall to pieces
and left its guts in the yard overflowing with overgrowth
and weeds. Parking a car, hopping out, you'd walk
about walls, and step into house, where my grandfather
often stepped out, with large thermos of cold
iced tea, always unsweetened, always eager to give
his grandchildren a sip if they asked. His whistles
singing off the walls, and a slew of barn cats, and feral

cats, but never house cats would come
scrambling from inside of hiding places,
holes, and underneath junk and follow him, this pied
piper singing out in music that Jiminy Cricket would be
proud of, and they would know feeding time was coming,
and he'd track past his shed, past one barn, and into
his biggest one, and there he'd disappear and work,
and feed, and gather up seed and sew what he could

but now that land is not what it was but the memory
of what was there, and in truth, had it been kept
in its original state, it would not house the life it did,
for we all grew up, and some are no longer here,
that made a farm house what it could be, a place
for fellowship among family.