Thursday, July 12, 2012

Lost Legacy

photo: ellaraine lockie


Lost Legacy
by Ellaraine Lockie

Houses a hundred years old
with Alzheimer's
Abandoned in isolation wards
on western prairies

Where homesteads were settled
on small town sanity brinks
Mine long ago lost
to profit margins
on a minimal Montana farm

Hospice where I come to heal
from city assaults
My heart heavier
than the hard timber
turned driftwood soft

Decayed gray matter
that once supported ancestors
Who spun stories
about pet horses in the parlor
and vigilantes in the family tree
Our only valuable heirlooms

Tales vanished
through windows without panes
Into snow silent waste
Recycled in spring's
meadowlark music
John Deere's perennial plantings
And in sage scented memories

When orphaned cottontails
came home with little girls
Who grew up and come home
for foster care from a past
fading into oblivion

Where fragments of facts
atrophy into fiction
In the waste away
of what once was

~ first published in Arizona Literary Magazine