by David Feela
From the road nobody can tell who's home.
It looks like a house, a barn, the rusted
remains of a tractor parked
under a cottonwood tree.
The house is in disrepair, as if the family
had all it could handle
turning the earth into cash.
They packed up and headed south,
according to the neighbors,
and the farm still belongs to
the old man living on the ridge.
Nobody else will rent it.
Nobody wants to tame that urge
to have what they want right now.
Eventually the farm will be plowed under
like the fields around it,
the seeds of another subdivision
spread by the wind
and those blood red sunsets on the ridge
right where the old farm waits
simply echo the ache
of its hundred little acres.
David Feela's work has appeared in regional and national publications. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for The Four Corners Press. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas, is now available.
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