Claudia Buckholts

Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire

founded 1764

On mailboxes, the same names appear;
in the town library a few new books nestle
among ancient volumes; shop proprietors

abandoned their long beards, women their
floor-length dresses. The white spires of
Town Hall and the Congregational church

still rise over the green common where I read
on monuments the names of the dead, the wars
they died in. Blue mountains stretch out behind

the haze. I imagine the camps of the Pawtucket
and the Massachusetts drowsing in fields of grass
where now horses graze and dun-colored sheep

bleat in meadows ringed with bloom: thistle,
ox-eye daisy, fragrant spikenard. Pines on hills
rise high and narrow, red squirrels leap from one

crowned summit to the next. I spot a treehouse
where no one plays: the young have grown up,
sped away on the highway. The old reminisce

on porches at nightfall, amid fragrant clematis
and climbing roses. Fireflies form points of light
in the dark: a few grace notes, a coda of silence.

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Claudia Buckholts‘ third collection of poems is Travelers on Earth (Main Street Rag, 2023). She received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the Grolier Prize. Her poems have appeared in Minnesota Review, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.