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DocuSign Envelope ID:3E2A8197-2735-44CA-8810-5AD399233576 <br /> Pam Baggett <br /> 8800 Wilkerson Road <br /> Cedar Grove NC 27231 <br /> 919-732-9403 <br /> nightair@mindspring.com <br /> Twenty-First Century Pastoral <br /> Ignore the white plastic bucket hung <br /> upside-down on a fence post, faded blue tarp <br /> flung over a pyramid of rusting oil drums, <br /> towering hemlocks turned skeletal <br /> by Asian woolly adelgids, and this could <br /> be a field a hundred years ago, red oak, butternut, <br /> shagbark hickory framing a mountain pasture, <br /> grass grazed low, billows of wild white <br /> asters, silken seedheads of native clematis <br /> blanketing the lichened wooden fence. <br /> Pretend not to see the Japanese stilt grass <br /> seeding in the ditch, crowding out goldenrod, <br /> purple lobelia, forget the beer cans, <br /> cigarette butts littering the gravel road, <br /> the mangy feral cats cowering in an abandoned <br /> car, and it appears humans have done little <br /> harm here,just carved out a plot for two cows, <br /> a swaybacked horse, a small white house <br /> with an eight-cord woodpile out back, <br /> children that wade in the creek <br /> on hot summer days. <br /> Turn your back on the pick-up truck <br /> in the distance, raising dust in another year <br /> of record heat, record drought, and you bask <br /> in a world in balance, where ferns share <br /> the creek-bank with moss and rhododendron, <br /> a hawk swoops down to snatch a mouse <br /> from the field, not taking the rest. <br /> Slated to appear in Cold Mountain Review <br />