Photo by Shabnam Shademan
Cliché
Yet, a red barn is still best – warped and worn.
It settles into its stretch of earth – an old, heavy
woman who sags into a favorite chair.
This will be her place. A cavalcade of cats
chokes a darkness insulating splintered beams,
a scythe dulled with a history’s grunge,
and a thunderous silence – the rattled heart
of a regiment of mice. Like a ghost, rain passes
through its wood, curses muck rakes and corn sickles
with rust. This is where autumn stores its perfumes.
And if you lay your ear to the sill, air seeping
over the jagged glass fixed within a window,
you can hear the lost clank of a hammer and the hiss
of a hot shoe dropped into a bucket to cool.
– S. Thomas Summers