Poem of the Week

On the ghost-white rocker,

on the porch fronting a limestone

farmhouse built circa 1786,

twilight rolls the credits of the day,

and I ask myself, “What is my Pennsylvania?”

Is the soil of Penn’s Woods nothing more

than memorials of Valley Forge, the Liberty Bell,

Flight 93?

Is it nothing more than the

beginning of the Oregon Trail?

Is it nothing more than the stain of puppy mills

and the fight against urban sprawl?

Then I remember Somerset.

space

Nine miners trapped in the death shroud

of earth, rock, and stone,

two hundred feet below.

When the voice of Pennsylvania

(those armed with rescue drills,

the clergy comforted families,

firefighters and medics at attention)

called Lazarus from the tomb,

the trapped shook off their coal

dust funeral linens

and came forth.

This is my Pennsylvania.

space

When the arsonist’s touch,

tore an Amish man’s livelihood from his grasp,

fire charring a year’s labor of tilling the soil,

the community, both sect and secular,

did what could not be said of Rome:

the barn went up in a day.

This is my Pennsylvania.

space

A driveway nightlight breaks

through the infant darkness.

From across the still road on my neighbor’s porch,

Annette’s fingers dance hymns off the weathered accordion,

which mingle with the sound of clinking canning jars,

filled with neighbor-shared grapes,

a gift from my wife to her mother.

The warmed shoofly pie Thank You

sits on the counter inside our kitchen.

I stand on my porch edge,

This is my Pennsylvania.