Home Fires Burning

Home Fires Burning

 

Boxford:

 

Home to the upper crust

of that pie in the sky.

A posh, zoned to perfection

bedroom-eyed community

inhabited by, near-do-nothing

princes of the paper-pushing marketplace

proponents of all-off-shoring

and sole customers of every service industry

at which you now work.

They are the insurance agents for everything, except:

Joblessness

homelessness

and selfishness.

Self-righteous, self-appointed

Guardian Angels

of the sub–urban way.

Self-centered owners of high fences

neighborly folks, who

while an elderly man’s home

burned to the ground

never noticed.

 

His was a humble, tumble-in cottage

far from the center of town

and outside the inner circle of Main Street.

It was off the central artery

at the end of a lonely, private road

and difficult to see, for it was overwhelmed

by a large adjacent barn

property of the “prime” estate.

Like a moon of Jupiter

his home was seldom seen

never visited

and hardly an attraction

to those of social value

which, according to their mirrors

was just about everyone in town.

 

This elderly man lay there

puffing, what was to be his final cigarette

maybe, recalling, when this was a farming community:

How the “bullshit” in the air

was carried by wind and not words

how women went to town to purchase candles

not to get a waxing.

and how men with dirty hands

would shake them, when they met.