Ted Charnley

Hidden Legacy

Burgeoning brush at the base of a hill
had harbored a hidden, derelict dump
that the late landholder left for me,
found when I freed up a path to the peak.

In a cache were cabinets, cable and pipe,
a chair and some chain, a Flexible Flyer,
bent, broken and bared to view,
their lingering metal made to last.

No worm worked its way through them yet,
nor could water rot or winds erode them.
Somehow, they’d simply resisted rust
and the throes of freezing and thawing, so far.

Hired hands to haul them were sent
on a needless trek; no truck could get near.
A Bobcat with bucket to bury them under
wheeled in retreat from the walls of trees.

If I see a few seasons, some seventy years,
it’s barely the blink of an eye for iron.
Longer processes plan for the planet
to heal any trace of transients here.

Burgeoning brush again will bar
the path that I cleared, reclaiming this place.
Who holds it next will inherit the hill
and the land left with its legacy still.
 

Ted Charnley’s verse has appeared previously in Pulsebeat, in multiple issues of such journals as The Orchards, The Road Not Taken, Think and The Lyric, and in anthologies.  His first full-length book, An Invocation of Fragments, was released in 2022 by Kelsay Books. He lives with his wife in a 200-year old farmhouse they restored in central Maryland.