By then all there was left
was a big brick house (still in fairly good shape),
the barn (barely standing), a few scattered sheds,
and, like a family curse or bad gene,
the decades-old debt.
The yard had long since been overtaken
by switchgrass and sage, the chain link fence
slouching and sagging along through the seasons,
foolishly ineffective at holding
the slowly creeping countryside at bay.
The last John Deere, which, for nearly a generation,
had cut and re-cut their ever-dwindling acreage,
crawled away years ago to finally die
in a dark corner of that crazy storm
and gravity-defying barn.
And the old farm trucks, Macks and Fergusons,
in their time had probably hauled the weight
of half a million bales (or more).
Now, they just sit like the haunted,
weathered hulls of burned-out derelict war ships,
one of them run-aground and beached
on the edge of the south field,
another almost completely submerged
in that blue-green sea of bluestem and wheat,
the cab barely breaking the turbulent surface.
The other ones stayed wherever they stopped.
Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be
(loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors.
He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is “Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023).” He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.