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Don Miller

Neighbor's Red Barn

In fifty years of filling the barn with hay he never repainted it—the "barn-red" wood siding left to weather and fade, mottle and grey. Now as I stand next to his hand-polished, mahogany-red casket, I think of what she said of the day the barn collapsed under the weight of the hay. She said he grasped his chest, fell to his knees and was at rest before the rust-streaked metal roof settled on the dew-soaked grass of summer.

hay field
the slow ascent
of a sandhill crane