Clade Song 16

Requiem for a (Non-)Vacant Lot

I grieve the mossed woods
across the street
in which cows grazed
the year I was born. I grieve
the nameless horse
I never met among the cows
among the pines, its nicker
and whinny as bees nectared
joe-pye along stone walls
and rusting barbed wire. I grieve
eight-hooters homing
ditched nests of squirrels
in coned spruce, madrigalling
night. How many wrens
beaked grub snatched from bark
where black driveways
seal ground? How many
thistles hosted moth
eggs, lent finches white down,
where now basements
house rumble of furnace, store
fertilizer, empty pots?

Abigail Carroll is author of three poetry collections: Cup My Days like Water, Habitation of Wonder, and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. Her poems have been anthologized in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope as well as in Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. Her work of nonfiction, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, was a finalist for the Zócolo Public Square Prize. She lives and writes in Vermont. Find her at www.abigail-carroll.com.