Just this side of Amarillo where the clouds that sailed
east and unspent over petroglyphs and earthen sea
snag on the topmost twigs of trees, their broad blue
bellies torn and spilling day after day across the prairie
where the green begins, there sits a tumbledown house
scoured gray and roofless by grit-born wind. Glassless
windows stare at the crows hopping lintel to chimney
to the splayed limbs of cottonwoods that in death as
in life lean sharply northward. It’s a ghost farm where
the spirits of Plenty and Want stand shoulder to shoulder
like a Grant Wood portrait, pitchfork raised and ready
to turn scats, dirt and memory piled against the boards,
from which a wisp of dust rises over this weary patch
of crisp yellow weeds and slides away to disappear
as the farmers’ did, like a sidewinder moving on.
©Dana Hughes
Furthermore... 
This may be one of your best lyric pieces ever. I love the imagery, as always: “broad blue bellies” of clouds “torn open”; and especially “the spirits of Plenty and Want standing shoulder to shoulder / like a Grant Wood portrait.” Oh, yes, how evocative is that? And the disappearing “wisp of dust” disappearing “as the farmers did, like a sidewinder moving on.” Somehow the connection of a farmer’s abandonment to a snake’s restless motion lends a sadness, a loneliness, and a hint of how grim a place this seems to be. Well done, my dear friend, well done. Yet again, you are inspiration.
thank you Paul. as always, I am grateful for your thoughtful comments.