Five thousand miles from here
North Sutton is sleeping.
Gas pumps doze
by Vernondale’s store.
Old farmhouses lie
tethered to the road.
How quiet they are.
Holding the darkness
still in their windows,
resting their great roofs
among the trees.
Slowly, slowly they shift
their white sides
in the moonlight.
In a sound sleep
the church
lifts its stopped clock
into the night sky.
—Wesley McNair, Chile, 1978