Here There Was a Barn

Here There Was a Barn
by Scott Bradley

Here there was a barn.
Over there a house.
Where was the dump?

Piece of a charcoal-powered iron.
A shackle, its pin rusted to half the required size.
A mule shoe.

An arrowhead, twice broken
By a miss and then a plow?

Trees once towered here.
My brother shot his first buck just over there.
The fire took it all.

Got to build a pole-barn
Keep the goats out of the snow.
And for you we'll fix the yurt
get you out of that tiny trailer.

The other day I visited a friend who lives rough on a fire ravaged ridge with her goats, sheep, mustangs, dogs and cats. A true mountain-woman. It was her birthday and another friend visited from another ridge. A true mountain-man. He offered me a finger-sized joint, lit up his own, asked why I didn’t ‘grow’, and told me of these hills 50 years ago. Then we poked around with a metal-detector. “Found fortunes with this thing.” Maybe that explains his 250 acre spread. Or maybe it’s the ‘growing’. Or maybe the quartz-gold mine — raw gold, “still attached to Mother Earth”.

Gazing into the past we see the future. The changes seem immense, but Nothing never changes.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.