Lucile Burt, Bell Farm
Listen:
Walking on History
By Lucile Burt
You walk on land glacier-scraped,
human-changed. Yesterday others
trod this path before you. Someone
will follow tomorrow. Trails made
eons ago by foraging bear, deer, bobcat,
used for millennia by Wampanoag
to hunt, fish, to grow corn, beans, squash.
Later, on land settler-cleared, tracks made
for farm carts, for horse and buggy rides.
Just last century, turkeys raised
on Frieda Landers’ farm, and Bell Farm’s
Tennessee walking horses grazing
in the meadow. And now, you walk
on land preserved for you, where trees
grow again in fields no longer tended,
where thousands have stepped before.
Lucile Burt is a retired high school English and creative writing teacher currently living in Wellfleet MA. Her chapbook Neither Created Nor Destroyed won the 2012 Philbrick Poetry Prize from the Providence Athenaeum and was published in April 2012. The Cone of Uncertainty, her latest poetry collection, was published in 2018 by Kelsey Books. Her poems have been published in various small press journals and in the anthology Teaching with Fire and have been featured on Poetry Sunday on WCAI, the NPR station of the Cape and Islands. Since moving to Cape Cod, many of her poems have been inspired by the landscape of the Outer Cape. The work of writing poetry, with its careful attention to sound and rhythm, is a kind of meditation that helps her see connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Bell Farm • Cotuit
Bell Farm is part of the Eagle Pond and Little River Sanctuary. If looking at the Eagle Pond Trail Guide, #27 is near the view that visitors to the plaque location (see below) will be able to see.
Parking: Landers Lane – 3 spots
Map Link: click here
Plaque location: On the map, it is the second bench (L to R) near the trail map intersection that looks across the meadow (originally designated for 15 house lots) and to a path that leads in the woods.