Tractor Bones & Rusted Trucks

Here is piece from my next poetry/essay book "Tractor Bones and Rusted Trucks" which I hope to release winter of 2016-17

"A Marker in the Lane"

His name was never etched in stone
Above the doorway
Of a library or a civic building or a school.
It didn’t appear at the gateway to a park
Or on a street sign.

He left no mark
On the fields he’d farmed –
Crops planted, tended, harvested
Consumed or sold
The stubble plowed under or disked
Disappeared into next year’s work.

I walk the lane from the road
To where a house and barn once stood.
On a half-way post
A roll of rusted barb
That he’d saved to one day patch the fence
Tells me that he was here.