An Invitation Poem by Marcus Smith Poetry

Bring your boots. My cabin stands in an empty filed
That once grew sweet corn, and our dry winter promises
A rainy season the way laughter follows a grim joke.
We'll walk the mud and try to ignore the surrounding acres
Of new custom homes all flying their satellites
Like nation-states searching the air for anything.
We'll watch the morning mist, bullied by convoys of cars,
Disappear before breakfast while Sam, the last horse, rolls
In mire, scratching his back and snorting at the sky, his friends
Either put down or sold to a tourist barn in New Hope.
I miss their shy company and how they filled the pasture
With galloping sounds of desperate, penned-in pleasure.
Red-tailed foxes flee here now, and every year more
And more geese stop by as they stubbornly trek north
For any open space. In summer, hummingbirds
Once as rare as the foxes, find this place too, happy
(They know that rare, light feeling) to be hummingbirds
Wherever they happen to hover. Today deer graze near
The pond, in the shadows of the few remaining black oaks
And pines I still call the woods. How these refugees, their young
Keeping close, got to the farm and where they'll go
I don't know. Don't know where I'll go when they build
On the only fallow property left in Chester County.
If you want to see how green the spring can be, and why
A heart, like a tree, will bloom until the very end.
Do visit soon.

Atlanta Review,10th Anniversary Anthology