The barn that raised me bowed with grace,
Surrendered slow to patient rot—
Its weathered walls the green reclaim
A shrine to things the years forgot.

The rafters sag like broken vows,
The loft where swallows stitched their nest
Now opens, raw, to grasping boughs
That pierce the ribcage of its chest.

I climbed these beams when they stood tall,
While hay dust whirled through honeyed light—
Now lichen veins the listing wall
And dims my childhood into night.

The door hangs crooked, half-unhinged,
A mouth mid-sentence, mute with shame—
The paint that once was white has thinned
To ash, as if confessing blame.

It kept our secrets, kept our tools,
Our rusted tractor, winter’s feed—
Now only stillness and shadow rule,
The hallowed psalm of fallen seed.

I loved you vertical and square,
Sentinel cut against wind and storm—
Yet watching you unravel bare
Is to learn even ruin has form.

The beauty isn’t what you were,
But what you’ve given to the ground—
How gracefully you now confer
To wilderness without a sound.

You caved, but not without goodbye—
This splintered hymn through roots and stone.
The things that shelter years gone by
Must fall to feed the forest’s throne.