My house is empty and my family dead
or lost and scattered far beyond recall,
or faded in the distance, disappeared,
and I alone remain, the last of all.

I gaze about me. Here is furniture
enough for dozens -- tables, chairs and beds.
Except for me, nobody needs them now.
Unused they sit, as time unrolls its threads.

I talk aloud now, just to hear a voice;
The emptiness is more than I can bear.
Each day I scan the skies above my house,
“Let there be owls,� but there is nothing there.

I cannot tend these gardens all alone,
growing food that no one wants to eat.
The verdant fruits, unsavored, go to rot
and sink into the dirt beneath my feet.

Not long ago these halls were filled with joy.
Within my lifetime men and women laughed
and worked and loved. In warm community
they shared their dreams, and strove, and plied their craft.

Grandmothers telling tales of noble deeds
to children by the fire, night after night.
“It isn’t bedtime yet! Please tell us more.
What happened next? Did Harry win the fight?�
Could I but, listening, hear those words again
like faint and distant echoes, times gone by
when all seemed possible, the world was new,
and no one dreamed that someday it would die.

Within my memory these halls were decked
for holiday in silver, green, and red,
with candles bright and fragrant boughs of pine.
I decorate no more. My kin are dead.

My line has gone extinct. The world has changed,
and those who don’t change with it fall behind
like me, are left alone in stillness vast
and deep, the last exemplar of my kind.
A coffin of a life that was, a song
no longer sung, a tale no longer read,
a soul adrift, a heart that beats for naught.
My house is empty and my family dead.