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| Abandoned horse-drawn farm machinery |
Goldenrod and briars
after the first years,
asters and black locusts
after five,
sweeten the ground for the poplars,
then maples, then oaks rising
through broken machinery,
the ashes crowded out,
a new world thickening
on the floor of the nascent woods.
Who can tell
where the springhouse stood,
and where the sugar camp,
where the arbor and the swing?
While in the cities again
families reported their dead
and fled.
Wild onion spikes the clover.
—patterned on Ellen Bryant Voight's prologue to Kyrie,
a collection of sonnets based on reports
from the 1918 pandemic.
