Nightingale Boards

It is never a question About 
what is true. 
 
While my mother was grocery shopping 
My grandfather would sit 
 
On the metal bench outside 
With the other old men 
 
And they would smoke 
Their camels and pall malls 
 
And burnt pipes and they would tell stories 
About crops and tractors 
 
And memories of the war 
And arthritis and building their barns themselves 
 
And as a choir they would say 
They laid boards bent on purpose 
 
So on some darkest night 
They could hear something shambling 
 
In the loft, hooves in the grain, Ageless 
breathing sighing from the hay.