THE SUMMER OF 2012
The village is a piece of small-town America, a one traffic-light town, a main street lined on both sides with honey locusts. Tubs and window boxes filled with flowers. Old brick buildings. Neat houses and well tended lawns and gardens. A variety of shops. Once. Not now. Not this summer. For sale signs in front of many houses. Some empty, the gardens and grass left to go wild, wither and die. Empty store fronts. The pharmacy gone. The general store gone. A restaurant gone. A card and gift shop, antique shop, real estate, children’s shop, food shop. Gone.
People come up with ideas and plans. A community playhouse in an unused building. A housing development on the edge of the village where stands a deteriorating girls’ school. A lot of talk and no action. A lot of questions and no answers. We wait.
white hot sky–
with an ancient dance
we pray for rain
HAIBUN TODAY,
4 comments:
__ I adore, and I'm lured, by small old towns, with their life of nature as their gift to civility and community.
__ Here though, I could easily be accused of crudeness, and classlessness, by posting this senryu-remark... it reflects a comic phrase, written in a well read book of long ago. _m
a town so small
it had but one hooker
the virgin
No takers for the hooker. Funny senryu.
Adelaide
It sounds like one of the towns near where I used to live in Oklahoma.
This is one of those poems that a person can feel.
Hi Sandy,
Thanks for commenting. This is the town I left 6 months ago. There was always lots of talk, big plans and no action. The derelict school is still there, looking worse each day. It has become famous (or infamous) and the Bennett School is written about a lot on Google, even videos on YouTube.
Adelaide
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