Yield

The old granary stands scuffed at the roots,
stooping over this careworn route
where spray-painted trucks-for-hire
creak through another yellow Friday afternoon
in search of the verve that will draw out
sustenance despite the fallow future,
the inevitable weathering down of usefulness
among the errant sunflowers that swarm
around the mile markers defining easy exits,
suggestive always of some pardoning arc of time
pushing desire beyond the plans of the city fathers
who were long ago so defamed by their stakes
in the ground and bound by their greed that they
became little more than a pile of parched ledgers
flung across the cement floor beside these scales
stripped of measure but still able to gauge
the degrees between convalescing or obsolescing—
a red arrow of blood edging in from the West,
a plow blade breaking red clay under clouds
where the rain once again withholds its blessings.