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| Old Wind Mill by Skip Hunt |
Caller of Storms
Lying beneath the hand stitched comforters
In her mother's old room
She'd hear the steady rhythm of the old mill
Turning to the spring breeze
She'd awake to the turn of the rusty gears
Heralding a shift of the weather.
She thought she could hear it tell
Of the changes of the seasons as the years passed
Its functioning years long forgotten
It stood as sentinel
Its blades against the clouds
And cried, she believed, in a rusty voice of storms not yet seen.
Grandpa used its rise in pitch
As signal to lock up the barn
And herd the family to the dank cellar
Where wrapped in a quilt from her bed
She would listen to the howl of the wind above
Singing with the tin windmill.
And believe it called up the storms.
The storms would skip and run
Leaving broken trees and torn tin in their wake
When one leveled the wind pump
Her father bolted the downed pin wheel head
To the side of the old metal shed
As a hex sign, he said
To keep the storms at bay.
J. Binford-Bell
August 2011
