On our way out to the highway,
to pick up some things in town,
we cross over fields
that hold beans and corn
in the summer
but now are abandoned
battlefields littered with
cornstalk soldiers
memorializing past green
glory and wealth.
We pass a farmhouse
ringed by a hedge just budding out
and about which someone has hung
a festoon necklace of plastic, pastel-colored
eggs.
Past more fields, the road
crosses another at a ninety degree angle—
two long streaks through a
vast spring graveyard—
with stop signs.
In a field to my right, a lone crane
pecks for her dinner and my husband
says, “It is so desolate.”
In the distance, we can hear
the bells of St. Peter’s church, thin
in the cold air.
The crane lifts herself, rises from the
ground as if saying, “It is finished.”
But we both know it is not
finished,
not even close.
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