Barn
leaning on a rounded hill
waving to buzzards
what’s left of an old red
a-frame barn soars upward,
a cathedral of loss, a
shelter for mice and
possums and maybe
a rare tawny-eyed bobcat
whose kittens are tucked
under the rotting manger.
witness the gaping hayloft,
sweep your eyes down
to slovenly underbrush—
here is a thing like a jar
that makes the world
rise up and call out—
a skeletal frame to rein-in
undulating miles of sky
which would otherwise be
more than we could bear.
From What I Learned at the War (West End Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. Published with the permission of the author.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish was born in Hobart, Oklahoma. She received a BA and an MFA in English from the University of Texas - Permian Basin and a PhD in English from the University of Oklahoma. Mish is the author of What I Learned at the War (Lamar University Press, 2015) and Work Is Love Made Visible: Collected Family Photographs and Poetry (West End Press/University of New Mexico Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry. In 2019, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.