Strolling Through The Past Poem by David Welch

It's now a bird sanctuary,
and has been for some decades now,
the trail wanders through the forest,
past the rock walls of an old house.

The trail itself was once a road,
I can tell by the two rock walls,
run parallel for a mile,
but there were no cars here at all.

Maybe carriages way back when,
wood farm carts and things of that like,
but if you're looking for pasture
not a bit of it is in sight.

It is all second-growth forest,
where once the Holsteins grazed and fed,
on this land families carved a life,
generations were born and bred.

The kids must've played in that stream,
where the small waterfall cuts through,
small enough to be no danger,
fast enough to amuse the youth.

Men must've ridden through these paths,
stretch legs of their quarter horses,
running them on the rare day off,
preparing for the fair's races.

Did lovers sneak along the walls,
risking all to just sneak a kiss,
I think they called in ‘pitching woo, '
so many different names for this.

It ends in a rocky ridgeline,
looks across the Hudson Valley,
to the fortress of the Catskills,
where they rise up majestically.

The view is half grown in these days,
can't imagine in the years past,
when all of this was open field
and the vista was far more vast.

Did some man sit here on this rock
at the end of the Civil War,
drinking in this land's great beauty,
and seeing the horror no more?

Did this farm bring him some solace?
Did quiet fields let him know peace?
Would he even recognize it
if he were here instead of me?

It is strange strolling through the past
when by all the forest it's drowned,
but it's a bird sanctuary,
and has been for some decades now.