We widowers wait in our houses,

Shrunken by our wives’ souls’ flight

From this green and humid vale.

Our houses are become monuments

And our street the lane

Winding through the graveyard.

Our children’s voices, tender and faint,

Dangle at the end of a wire a continent away.

Six-mile-long Crow Island quiet now,

Once fed us food and fed America steel.

The mills rust and at night a string of lights

Warns ships in the narrow channel

To keep clear of the hulk.

We raise our heads tonight to the Moon

And watch as it grows a red crescent

At its South Pole, spreading until

We are looking upon a rusty Mars,

Then we watch a yellow crescent grow

In the south,

We watch the red fade upward,

And we are left with a red-rimmed Moon

Floating in the black night.

February 21^st, 2008