Through spider webs and small panes in the window near the peak,

The sun’s rays strain, as they have at midday, these two hundred summers.

This loft was packed with hay and emptied decades back,

But straws are scattered still across the floor,

And bits of twisted jute that once bound bales,

Their tensile strength sapped by the drying of successive years,

Lie in the light, almost the color of the hay.

All life is grass. Then death, perhaps,

Is the existence of these hollowed husks of straw

That powder under the pressure of the light alone,

Their particles to drift in air or else

To settle softly into cracks in ancient wood.

They enter life as startling sprouts; they end

As dust caught in between things or

As motes that glint a moment in the sun.

D.W. Brainerd lives in Howland. His self-made collections of poetry include “Under the Gold Sun” and “A Turn of the Wheel.”