On Dissolution, by Margot Kahn

Margot Kahn is the author of the biography, Horses That Buck, and coeditor
of the anthology, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home. She
holds an MFA from Columbia University.


About the poem:

There’s a little desk in my bedroom where I like to write poems. The view looks out
to our old barn that’s in the process of falling down in the way that old barns do. I
have complicated feelings about the barn and the fact that it was built by people
who made their lives here, people I will never know. This year there has been an
unusually large flock of swallows in our fields and, as I try to make sense of my
place on this land, in this world, with so many things around me out of my control,
I watch them.