Barn Life

I miss the barn, the hay loft, a place to listen to the midday sun creaking through old wood., the small clouds of horse flies moving as one in their jet-pack bodies, that rose and fell their small engines stuttering. The humpbacked skeleton of a tractor where goats built their castles, the oily emptiness of its heart as it clanked under their hooves into a gearless life once more. When the empty stalls echoed a warning to the horses that no longer stabled there, I would get up into the sagging rafters where feather whiskered winds rustled dust through broken boards, It used to take them an hour before they knew I was missing, later they knew where to find me. I miss the soul-deep smell of dry leather tackle long unharnessed, the empty cans of linseed and engine oil, the old shotgun so rusted it grew out of a dirt-caked bucket as brown as a whittled flower stalk. All gone, the barn, the farm house and ‘they’ - gone now. Yet sometimes they call to me as I dream in a lullaby loft, and I still a little disappointed to be found.