The Homestead
by Joseph Bottum
The abandoned gray-wood house still stands. I’m not sure how — some final strands Of fraying wood and framing nails Still hold against the breeze that rales And wheezes through the window frames. The roofbeam bowed, each winter claims A patch of shingles from the eaves — An old ditch silted up with leaves, And in the yard a rusted pail, A broken shovel, a vanished trail That would have led to a painted door, A furnished room, a sanded floor, A kettled flame in a river-stone hearth, A settled place on unsettled earth: Our hearts are worthless, gazing here Where cows once grazed and a stream ran clear — Before the drought, before the flood, Before the waste of sweat and blood, Before the foulbrood drained the hives And heatstroke took the piglets’ lives. Our hearts are worthless, gazing here At a fruitless thing: this joy turned fear, This shot at living, fallen wide, A gray-wood house where a homestead died. We were the shadow people, seen In interrupted sunlight. We were the gaps in prairie air: The places where the grassland Ceased for a moment or two — and then Resumed again with our passing. Do you hear the silence that sounds After the meadowlarks’ singing? Do you see what is left when leaves Fall from chokecherry branches? We are the ghosts of wheat cut short and hay laid out in windrows. We are the cracks in the dried floodplains, The fissures in the bedrock. We are the plows the plains have dulled. We are the shriveled saplings. We are the change that did not take. We are the gone and graveless. Down in our bones, our Puritan marrow, We know no garden lingers here In a fallen world, in the red rock’s shadow: No land of milk and honey, the clear Trout run and an easy furrow, The stingless bee, the nuzzling deer. The last bear shot in South Dakota Was drinking from a Black Hills stream. The world is upside-down most mornings: A sleep awakened to a dream. I’ve seen the splash of angels drowning Deep in a land where seemings seem. Watch the wheat like a river of summer Wending its way, down to the fall. Nothing much is here but the nothing: A nothing that nothings best of all God’s empty places. And we are the spaces Where nothing is not: fleeting and small. An uncertain household, a faith unhouseled — What on these plains did they hope to find? If not new Edens, a horn of plenty, At least a landscape less unkind Than what they faced in this far country Uneucharisted, unenshrined. And now on the verge of a gray-wood homestead, The fallen fenceposts, a mislaid trail, I hear the prayers they said each morning, Hauling water, pail by pail, Knowing in terror that freedom for thriving Is also, always, freedom to fail. ══════════════════════════
Sally Thomas writes:
As Joseph Bottum once remarked, “A.M. Juster (b. 1956) is an American treasure. The only trouble is that America hasn’t quite figured out how to cash in on that treasure.” Be that as it may, A.M. Juster — the anagrammatic pen name of Michael J. Astrue — is a treasured friend to both of us here at Poems Ancient and Modern.
His service in senior roles under four U.S. presidents, including six years as commissioner of Social Security, would be, for most people, sufficient accomplishment for a lifetime. But his thirteen books of poetry and translation, including 2020’s Wonder and Wrath, a 2025 children’s book, Girlatee, and a new translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere for W.W. Norton (forthcoming and available for pre-order) speak to his dazzling range of gifts and concerns, and to the care and intellect he brings to any task — but especially to the practice of formal poetry.
Over the last two years, we’ve twice featured A.M. Juster’s crisp comic verse: his “Stern Warning to Canada,” vis-à-vis geese, to mark our one-year anniversary, and last May, his “Epistle to a Friend Confused about the Ivy League.” Today we welcome him back, to celebrate the publication of Joseph Bottum’s new book, This Far Country.
A.M. Juster writes:
For thousands of years poetry has served multiple functions: expression of love, expression of grief, provocation of laughter, and expression of religious impulses. Our current literary establishment does not much believe in love, laughter, or God, which limits contemporary poetry’s range — and one of the functions of poetry that has declined is the public poem.
A notoriously difficult form, the public poem is often trapped between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of didacticism. In England several magnificent poets have resisted approaches to become poet laureate at least in part due to their fear of having to produce poetry for public occasions. That fear is understandable. Many of those required occasions — minor royal weddings, for example — do little to inspire poetic imagination.
In the United States the job description for poets laureate is flimsier, but a similar angst has haunted the poets who have performed at the inaugurations of Democratic presidents since John F. Kennedy’s in 1961. That first performance narrowly averted disaster. Intense sunlight blinded the aging Robert Frost so badly that he could not read his new prepared poem “Dedication,” so he recited his trusty “The Gift Outright” instead. It worked out well: “The Gift Outright” is a much better poem. Since then, however, stressed poets asked to perform new inaugural poems on short notice have illustrated the difficulties of writing public poetry.
One of the few guardians of this lost art is Joseph Bottum, a fact that occurred to me for the first time when I read his Audenesque (in all the good ways) Phi Beta Kappa poem, commissioned for Princeton’s 2022 graduation ceremonies. Called “Four Seasons,” it appears in his 2023 poetry collection, Spending the Winter (with one of those four seasons, “Autumn,” later offered here in the Poems Ancient and Modern newsletter).
This past year, Bottum was commissioned to write more public poetry — verses commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in which the State of South Dakota asked him to connect the great themes of the Declaration to the experience of the Great Plains. Bottum’s success at doing so might be measured by the fact that the newly released book, This Far Country, has been chosen for inclusion in the official U.S. time capsule, to be buried in Philadelphia on July 4, 2026.
The book is a suite of four poems, each drawing on a midwestern image: the meadowlark, chokecherry jelly, an abandoned homestead, and the flow of the Missouri River down to the Mississippi. The third poem, for example — Today’s Poem here at Poems Ancient and Modern — allows us to hear some of the range of public-voice poetry. In “The Homestead,” Bottum sidesteps didacticism in the second line with a declaration of ignorance: “The abandoned gray-wood house still stands. / I’m not sure how.”
This opening section of the poem continues, just a detailed description of an abandoned prairie house in tightly controlled iambic tetrameter rhymed couplets, with the spareness of the description steering the poem away from sentimentality.
And we soon reach our inability to judge, to feel what the homesteaders felt, when we look at the abandoned farm: “Our hearts are worthless, gazing here / Where cows once grazed and a stream ran clear.”
Having fixed that image in the reader’s imagination, the poem then starts to play with the reader’s emotions. It shifts into an unrhymed ballad meter that echoes the desolation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and its fallen world:
We were the shadow people, seen
In interrupted sunlight.
We were the gaps in prairie air:
The places where the grassland
Ceased for a moment or two — and then
Resumed again with our passing.
When this mournful section ends twelves line later, the narrator finally speaks in his own voice, this time in six-line tetrameter stanzas, with masculine (one-syllable) rhymes on lines 2, 4, and 6, while lines 1, 3, and 5 each have an unrhymed feminine (two-syllable) ending:
Down in our bones, our Puritan marrow,
We know no garden lingers here
In a fallen world, in the red rock’s shadow:
No land of milk and honey, the clear
Trout run and an easy furrow,
The stingless bee, the nuzzling deer.
Unlike Eliot’s grim masterpiece, “The Homestead” does offer hope, in the way that great public poems do. The next-to-last stanza has a set of unusual adjectives — unhouseled and the parallel uneucharisted, together with uncertain and unenshrined — that refer to lack of grace, leaving the reader with the implication that grace is still possible. This hint is reinforced in the final stanza with its powerful meditation on free will and the hard decisions of democracy:
And now on the verge of a gray-wood homestead,
The fallen fenceposts, a mislaid trail,
I hear the prayers they said each morning,
Hauling water, pail by pail,
Knowing in terror that freedom for thriving
Is also, always, freedom to fail.
We are impoverished as a nation because we see such poems so rarely.
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I love poets who offer us a sense of place in their verse. Thanks for highlighting this poem and Jody’s poetry as a whole. Such a gift.
This is just tremendously good.