The Children

This is where they swarmed from prairie mornings,
Cold with solitude, to learn: the one-room
Schoolhouse, empty now, broken and aslant
On the skyline, birds nesting in the stove,
The sun trespassing in the attic. Bees
Have found a home inside the hollow wall
And hum all afternoon behind the cracked
Slate blackboard where children made their sums
Add up a century ago, and scrawled
Their names, until the fields reclaimed their own
To write their lives in furrows on the soil
For years beneath the sun, against the day
That each would find his nameless cell below
The hive of broken headstones down the road.