Barbara Reynolds
One hundred years from now
the cemeteries will be full of us.
Others will be living in our houses
and our neighbors will be gone,
replaced with new, quieter ones
with different pets.
Shoppers in the market will be different
with different cashiers, and different boys
will recover the carts in the parking lot.
The children in the classrooms will be gone,
replaced by the children of the children
of the children that are there now.
The teachers, too, will change,
and what they teach, especially history,
will not be the same.
One hundred years from now, people will be mixed
then matched, and perhaps no one will care
anymore who belongs and who doesn’t.
Others will write about us and our times,
how we lived, what we did,
what we should have done,
what was better left undone.
Barbara Reynolds’s work has appeared in The Avocet. She is a retired high school math teacher and an instructor in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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