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Moss gatherer
my legacy is a green rock
one of the finest in the forest
gentle as an ill face
swelled with pain
Poèmes sur le thème : legacy
Poèmes sur le thème « legacy » sur Poets.by.
Immortality
Its spine broken and torn
Leaves left devoured by silverfish,
Corners crumbling with age -
My hands tremble as I open the book.
Carefully, tenderly, I turn the frontispiece -
Shabby, tattered yet holding up together
With a dignity that only books can have -
I shake out the dust and faecal matter.
The book is still silent, slightly embarrassed
But not showing any -
Like my mother, paralysed
As I clean her with wet cotton blobs.
In the left corner of the first page
The book said -
‘With all good wishes to my son’
Signed, my father, forty years ago.
What to Do About Trees
What to do about trees, for she had room:
Have an orchard. But isn't that thinking
About twenty years ahead? So she went
To the tool room for her spade in November;
Took that and four apple saplings down
Onto the flat by the road, and began. Years she
Did this, working up and around the rise
Of better ground. Pears, cherries, quince
Abounded, but the plums got blight, and had to
Be started over. She was too old to harvest
Or even get shade from nut trees, they're so slow;
Uncoupling crop from objective, she anyway set
Them out, along with the rest. Last, she
Thought of mulberries. The hens could have
Really used those. Oh, well. She ordered,
Even this late in life, and planted once more,
The Reward
No greater earthly boon than this I crave,
That those who some day gather 'round my grave,
In place of tears, may whisper of me then,
"He sang a song that reached the hearts of men."
Rev. Abner Peet
I had no objection at all
To selling my household effects at auction
On the village square.
It gave my beloved flock the chance
To get something which had belonged to me
For a memorial.
But that trunk which was struck off
To Burchard, the grog-keeper!
Did you know it contained the manuscripts
Of a lifetime of sermons?
And he burned them as waste paper.
Sonnets from a Lock Box I
How nonchalantly I spend with little thrift
His proud sparse earnings which were the frugal pay
Of a man’s stout will and honorable day.
What insolent spending of that sturdy gift!
When I reflect on him he seems like one
Who on a bleak hill set a lonely pine.
He saw the North Star in its branches shine.
His honest valors are by me undone.
Why I should own his box I cannot see.
For his scant legacy I am unfit.
Yet since he’s in the yard I have his key,
And somehow I am master over it.
I am like one who decks the Holy Tree
With tinsel shapes; then casts it in the pit.