(After a Black & White Photograph by Jared Carter) <br /> <br />Who alive remembers who lived there <br />seventy years ago? A family <br />of WASPS set in their ways? The leafless tree <br />in front was just a sapling then. Despair <br />did not weigh heavy on the owner’s brow, <br />a man who paid his taxes, loved his wife, <br />and who in ‘44 gave up his life <br />for freedom. Who today cares or knows how? <br />And now the house is boarded up, its last <br />tenants peddlers of cheap crack cocaine, <br />its naked boards exposed to elements, <br />its roof’s tar-paper caught in the grey blast, <br />around it dirty snow, above it rain. <br />The photo knows itself what it laments.<br /><br />Leo Yankevich<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-condemned-house/
