Pumpkins and Mums
October 26, 2008

I hope he got a good deal
for this small plot of goodness
and light beside the road
from Wilmore to the outside world.

Always a smile, a kind word,
and a better price than Sam Walton,

But three years of bad harvests,
and then this, four lanes of blacktop,
a way to get there faster.

Safer, too, I suppose,
and what price can you put on that?
But Blakeman’s Farm, how many generations
digging this rocky earth,
now erased by a broad stroke of asphalt.

Another victim of progress.

So I hope that he was well compensated
for the ground his grandfather passed to him,
on which I stood,
year after year,
choosing pumpkins,

always meaning to come back
for a few chrysanthemums.