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
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
