Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright©, 2004
Who Lived Here?
by
Mary Ann Rager
I must go down this little country road.
Ruts worn deep and narrow from a hayrack's heavy load.
To a lonely, forgotten farmstead, abandoned long ago.
Why it still stands, I will never really know.
Dry gray boards cling to the sagging house frame.
Gnarled trees and tall prairie grasses
Crowd close to hide its shame.
Hollow paneless windows, great gaping eyes,
Vacantly stare at the wide blue skies.
The screen door lies on the old stone well.
No one heard the day it fell.
Dust and cobwebs and broken chairs,
A bannister leans on what was once stairs.
An ancestor's picture still hangs on the wall.
Perhaps they couldn't take him away from it all.
It is so very, very still, no breeze moves
The tattered curtain that lies on the window sill.
I wish a swallow would dart in and out
Or bumble bees were buzzing about.
The rusty windmill's broken blades lie
In the moss covered wooden tank,
Where once tired horses, home from the field,
Rested and gratefully drank.
I'll not go down the path well worn,
To the tumbled down barn so dark and forlorn.
There's an ominous foreboding, akin to fear.
I no longer want to linger here.
I'll walk back up the dusty lane
I'm sure I'll never return again,
But oft when I wake in the dark of night,
I see that little homestead in the pale moonlight.
I hear an owl perched somewhere near
He's asking "Who, Who once lived here?"
Contributor's Notes...
Mary Ann Rager has lived in South Dakota all her life, where she has "always been writing." Mrs.
Rager has been married 53 years to a United Methodist minister, and has three grown sons. A
pastoral poet, she is a member of the South Dakota Poetry Society and the Poet's Round Table.
