Untitled ("I hear chimes on the porches")

A brief haunting piece where domestic sound, inherited prayer, and war collapse into the same old porch air.

An eight-line poem that listens its way from comfort to dread: 'chimes on the porches / that are three hundred years old' give way to 'the mother's pray / for their trained killers / to come home,' and a final foreboding - 'The secret is taking us / to the last place / we can find.'

The poem works by aural layering. First the chimes, impossibly old ('three hundred years'), an inherited domestic sound that makes the porches ancestral. Then beneath that pleasant ringing, the prayers of mothers, and the gut-punch phrase 'trained killers' for the sons they want home - the bland comfort of the porch undercut by the recognition that this place sends its children off to kill and waits for them. The two soundscapes coexist: wind chimes and maternal prayer, peace and war on the same porch. The close turns prophetic and grim: an unnamed 'secret' is 'taking us / to the last place / we can find,' a movement toward exhaustion or extinction, the end of available ground. The brevity keeps the chimes ringing only briefly before the silence of 'the last place.' The spelling 'pray' for prayers is the source's and I have kept it. The closing 'secret' is left undefined, so its precise referent stays open; the poem's drift from heritage to war to a final, last place is clear.