Graveyard of Intentions: A Look at Ronnie K. Stephens’ Poem, “Derelict”

As summer ends, I realize most of it didn’t go as planned. A stack of books remains unread, I’m losing interest in saving my failed vegetable garden, and if I’m honest, most of my ambitions and projects add up like a  dusty “To Don’t” list. Lately, I’ve been thinking less about what didn’t get done, and more about what it feels like to carry that empty weight. That emotional shift from frantic disappointment to a more resigned kind of stillness is something I see in Ronnie K. Stephens’ poem, “Derelict.”

The poem moves at a quiet, controlled pace as the speaker centers themselves in the rot and decay around them:

“I am the hole in the backyard festering


like a wound in the summer sun, gutted

earth where we buried a trampoline then


watched it rot. I am the rotting. The rotten.”

We amalgamate ourselves into our domestic world, especially in the unsung repetition of daily life. Home is not just a setting, but a mirror of our personalities, the container of our memories, and sometimes, even if inadvertently, a projection of our inner state.

“Dishes crusting in the sink /
 after too many dinners taken in separate / rooms.”

Our emotional state becomes embedded in the inanimate—we are the pantry, we are the hole in the yard, we are the list that never ends. Our surroundings become an extension of ourselves–the more you give to your personal space, the more it becomes you, for better or for worse.

What I admire most about this poem is Stephens’ ability to list these recurring signs of rot, abandonment, and incomplete intentions with intuitive restraint. This restraint is a kind of clarity– that despite what feels like relentless pain or failure, the world still spins on:

“Our children / stir in their beds. I rise to get them ready / for another day.”

The speaker persists in quiet, stubborn survival.

When I look out the window at my less-than-perfect garden, I know the weeds are there because I let them grow—and in that way, they’re an extension of my own neglect. In “Derelict”, the speaker doesn’t just observe the weeds, they are the weeds—life that doesn’t die easily, life that persists even if unwanted:

“…too stubborn to wither in this bitter winter.”

Whether out of instinct, resolve, or some faint sense of promise, we persist—maybe not triumphant, but undoubtedly alive.