Towns

People die.

They are decently buried.

Horses die.

They are hauled away

by aging negroes

with rattling wagons and other horses

which are blind.

This is well. It is the normal

order.

But towns die

and decompose scandalously

without decent burial-

out here in God's country,

where the prairies are bitten

by the furnace-like summers

and the icy winters.

No aged negroes can perform

that last hauling-away-

the last office of mercy.

With their blind horses

they cannot haul away the cadaver

which feeds them.

Foseph Stanley Pennell