It leans against the shed,
rust spreading like old stories
told too many times.

The wheel is bent,
half-burried in earth
that no longer remembers
what it meant to be moved.

Once,it carried weight-
soil,bricks,autumn leaves,
the burden of small labours
under a wide,indifferent sky.

Now it holds
only stillness.
A kind of rest
earned
without permission.

The handles splinter
where hands once gripped with purpose.
No one notices.
They pass it
on their way to tasks
it can no longer join.

And yet-
in its silence,
in its refusal to be useful,
it becomes something else:
a memory of effort,
a monument
to the things
that once carried us
and then stopped.