THE HOUSE WITH NOBODY IN IT

Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a
minute and look at the house, the tragic house, the house with
nobody in it.

I have never seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things.
That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.

This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass,
And somebody ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.
It needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and
tied; but what it needs the most of all is some people living inside.

If I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid I'd put a gang of
men to work with brush and saw and spade. I'd buy that place and fix
it up the way it used to be and I'd find some people who wanted a
home and give it to them free.

Now, a new house standing empty, with staring window and door, looks
idle perhaps, and foolish, like a hat on its block in the store.
But there's nothing mournful about it; it cannot be sad and long for
the lack of something within it that it has never known.

But a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has
sheltered life, that has put its loving wooden arms around a man
and his wife, a house that has echoed a baby's laugh and held up
his stumbling feet, is the saddest sight when it's left alone,
that ever your eyes could meet.

So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back.
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters
fallen apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house
with a broken heart.
.....Joyce Kilmer


Note: The house pictured is where I grew up and as a child it felt and looked so large and grand but when I again found it in 2003, it was as lonely as lonely can be.