POETRY

Ramshackle Barn

a free-verse poem by poet Christina M. Ward

A small white farmhouse with a ramshackle barn. It is perfect, we share with our eyes.

We pull in the circular drive and the feeling of home settles deep, takes root.

We peer in the windows. We picture our furniture arranged on the hardwood floors, laughter in a home of our own.

The grass rises tall and unkempt and in it nestles a ramshackle barn.

I can still smell the horses.

Piles of wood and discarded remnants of a family long gone, horses long gone, rusty horseshoes embedded in soils that once held the afternoon rides of a couple, in love.

Too many years, weather-gnawed and bent with disrepair, the barn leans, folds into itself wrapping history like a hug. Surely the mice and snakes hide here.

We are careful with our steps, reckless with our hopes — We picture each board of barn wood removed, sanded, stained, transformed.

A mix-hued gray board wall for the dining room. A coffee table. A headboard. What once held the breath of horses and swish of their tails, now holds the hope of our own.

For more on our story with this farmhouse — a house we hope will soon be ours:

Christina M. Ward is a poet and well-living blogger from North Carolina, where old barns still sleep in fields and tucked into forgotten places. They are dilapidated remnants of history and of the families that once used them.