Pagosa Springs Artists

Half-Standing

Scattered boulders pepper

the land, granite hills mimic

abandoned shields, treeless

and barren under a mouldering

sky, heaps sloping blindly

down to the vacuous, uncaring

Irish sea a century after the emigration

of an occupied nation. 

 

Squinting into a pale setting sun,

I make out shapes of some lonely

dwellings, half-standing ruins

yawning into the murky sky.

Falling away toward the shore,

a spate of broken stone walls

reveal open doorways, sightless

windows and bare dirt floors,

each set apart from its neighbors

by a barely-there path.

 

Thatch long gone, no furnishings

in sight, the only signs of one-time

habitation are wrecked fireplaces

and the occasional rusted tool left

among the scattered boulders.

 

first published in The Rockford Review

also published in Illinois State Poetry Society 

©2016 Bonnie Manion

   

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