EDGES
Just
beyond the prairie road
corn rows
swallowed a town,
whole
towns—
people,
who left
themselves in a graveyard.
Ancestors, concentrated in a square,
conveniently located for those who
care.
Nod your
head as you drive by
or stop
and tell the old folks “Hi.”
Our
families settled here –
then frontier –
to spend
lifetimes
carving edges . . . in the ground,
Setting
out
whom they could become
and where they could be found…
safe…
from the raiders
they invaded.
There was
Jeremiah’s farm –
full –
of the grounding tools
that plowed and raked their
lives together,
surrounding them with names .
. . homes
. . . and fences.
Full of kids
straining to get out
and breathe America’s chances.
Then
they
buried each other.
The cemetery,
a church yard once,
a church yard once,
punctuates
a sea of corn whose annual tide creep
challenges their edges’
integrity and symmetry.
We are
halted by their sentinel:
Plaqued words on a pedestal
speak of a wooden church burned long
ago,
Indian wars
and the Farrell’s store.
We linger
to honor those who spent a lifetime
building lifelines to our future
by tending
through their death-time
their place between the edges,
keeping them safe from today’s invaders:
This year, corn,
last year, beans,
last year, beans,
and by
taking them with us.
For here,
under our feet, only part of their journey ended.
Settlers
continue their settling
into the earth,
our minds,
our stories.
We travel
today,
unsettled raiders,
absconding
with
then rewriting family stories,
then rewriting family stories,
ungrounded
tools
for carving modern edges.
Who are
we?
And who
were they?
What did
the family do?
When?
Daddy,
tell me the story again.
Dennis R.
Keefe
April 18, 2015
