Garden of Guilt
The old rocking chair
on the porch is moving with
a ghost of wind and
all the fallen leaves
are sitting on the verge of
panic, and it feels
like there’s thunder just
below the floorboards and cracks
and pops of lightning
up in the cloudy
cathedral rafters of the
sky (where legend holds
that angels take their
smoke breaks and complain about
the management), and
our long-lost dog has
suddenly returned with a
thigh bone clenched in his
grinning teeth, from one
of the many skeletons
buried out in our
collective backyard
garden of guilt, overgrown
with nothing but weeds,
and a lone scarecrow
with a plastic Halloween
jack-o-lantern for
a head, a bird’s nest
for a brain and an empty
bee-hive for a heart.
About the Author: Jason Ryberg lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Image Credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston “Port Tobacco Houses, Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland” (1936) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 