The Steward
Like an actor running lines, Wilson had stories. The first of us who left Vermont, he tells, was the elder on foot who followed Indian trails taking months to cross New York then staked a claim, and walked back. The first families moved kin, livestock to this homestead, right here, and worked it for two hundred years. Through winters, hardships, storms and drought, sickness and deaths, we settled, farmed, built on… and finally, a school. Some gave up. We did not. Perhaps land accepts a steward. Wilson at 93 remembers.
Waterfall/Sanctuary
Photograph
Fall Run Park, Shaler, Pennsylvania
©2021 Janette Schafer
Philosophy and Conviction
go out the window in warm weather; the pain of misunderstanding, the excuses, the predictions… out with the renewed force of spring, strength surfaces, and breathing in again, we meet the recovering day
Apache Mare
Breathing clouds to the warming air,
in the faithful future of all her years;
proud and natural,
present as a boulder in the way of a path.
Chestnut flank pressed against a rising sun
this light, this field—all her own
there is no other place
no other world.
Poems ©2021 Antoni Ooto
All rights reserved
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