Homecoming    by  Robert Bolton

The scrub-encircled island of a town,
one church.   God loomed here on the hill
and led black rainclouds over these good works
my people bent to do behind the plough.

I'm leaning forward where the dark earth falls
away and back behind old double-furrows,
looking for graves and headstones where blossom rolled
among our orchards once.   Crosses, marble, troubles

catch my feet beneath the grass.   Old summers slip
under my leather soles.   Here we crucified eagles
in rows of a hundred along the fences.   They slapped
backward and forward in night air, bleeding

into the dark.   Dear Father, watching while the years
fall past, what did I pray in the years my life
was bound by the Bible?   Seasons circle; those old fears
fade like dust motes.   Fenceposts whiten, rafters move

over untrodden floors, the old house moans
into its grave, and rabbits burrow deep below
the mantelpiece.   So I put my question to these stones,
tumbling where love and ploughshares and the seasons go -

over and into earth:  dear walls and chimneys,
waiting, dusty mortar rustling in dry air,
who will remember those loves, or harvests, or the windy
way my shadow falls across our gravestones there?

© Robert Bolton