The Old Road Poem by Barry Middleton

Behind the farm in an ancient wood,
an ancient road followed the ridge
like I followed the tread of my father,
trying to make my steps as big as his.
The road had more success I'd say,
for it was carved from wilderness
in days when no machine
could flatten hill nor fill a hollow
so boys could find no spot along the way
to race a scooter in a trial of honor.
The road was walled where mules
had cut a trace, though not so deep
there was not still a hill to quicken
our walk or slow it to a turtle pace.
The way was vaulted there with trees.
It was a sacred place to pause,
to pray,
to play,
to wonder
if by chance some Confederate miser
had buried gold
as the story we were told.
The road had been there long
before the land divided North
and South in war.
And farther up the way there stood
in a meadow in the wood
an old piano church of African race.
There was no song upon its face,
its eyes had long been boarded shut,
the churchyard path was now a rut.
But nothing along the old road
could hold its vines embrace for long
save a simple house too abandoned
for even the poorest sharecropper
to wish it his. When first I came
to its door it had contents,
broken furniture and other remnants
of the former tenants.
The only thing that stayed there then
was truly not alive,
a fantasy of broken dreams,
evil mysteries and ghosts.
They made me run through thickets
propelled by common sense
and back to the church
for self defense.
But I was just a child
playing in the wood
and now not one sight along
the way is left unchanged
but the road itself.
Whatever stayed upon that hill
has left to haunt another childhood.
Now the only fears that haunt
are phantom deeds of living men
that make me want to dream
a childhood dream again.