Pine Rows and Squadrons




Pine Rows and Squadrons 







A move through late morning 

a road between rows, 

the pulpwood blinks 

across my eyes 



and a breeze breaks the rules 

of summer on the way 

to where—without a roof—  

only walls have survived  

a thousand millings.  



Questions about the hands 

that placed these bricks  

completing a space that’s 

now incomplete 



evade those few minutes, 

spark to flame and they’re gone. 

But entering the green rooms— 

full, cool, sky overhead there 

along the road, 



rooms as old as today as gone

as a world, the empty windows’ breeze 

blurring leaves, lines of verdant 

point to plane 



beside the tar leading home—I become 

caretaker, frozen like the squadrons  

bouncing on imagined string  

above me where a ceiling  

used to be. 





L. Ward Abel



L. Ward Abel, poet, composer, teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been  published hundreds of times in print and online, including Snow Jewel, The Reader, Yale Anglers' Journal, Versal, Words for the Wild, After the Pause, Istanbul Review, others, and is the author of one full collection and eleven chapbooks of poetry, including Jonesing For Byzantium (UKA Press, 2006),  American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012),  Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), Digby Roundabout (Kelsay Books, 2017), and The Rainflock Sings Again (Unsolicited Press, 2019).  


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