'Root and Rubble' by Jack Crone

Family rubbles are strewn all over the heath: those who’d long since escaped the country. Upstyx’d in nameless exodus from where their blood and their bodies had long mixed with the crops in tending. Remembered only by stone skeletons, and gnarled old trees in the garden. Gone are the sons of daughters for whom the breaking of backs, the toil and the sweat, was not enough; not for thatch and a half-empty horn. The fathers of those mothers would come tangled up and grafted on to the roots of the place, in concord with the worms, the lichen, and the fungi. Sustained only by the soil and not to be uprooted. Those that would possess the land after the thatch had fallen in and the walls begun to crumble. They would hold that rubble together with the weight of their roots, and always with that same stern face in the grain. The one they pull when their seeds are carried off by the wind.

For all that, perhaps the land just wasn’t what it was, before.