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Robert Frost
Over back where they speak of life as staying
(‘You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t’),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.
Out in the ploughed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano’s vigor.
All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care--
Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?
Early on summer days
I'd wake to my Dad's wedding band
clicking on the ivory keys.
His hymns would nudge me awake off the living room couch;
my camp site when AC was a luxury we still ignored as a family.
There was often no sheet music, no scrawled chord progressions guiding him,
just his hands knowing; finding the keys that agreed without looking.
At the time, it might as well have been
an alarm clock prelude to my chores, the signal that a break
from school could still be spoiled slapping paint on the peeling
exterior of our house as some lesson of work.
But now, I'd speak of this less harsh bugle call fondly.
I'd construct it into conversation so it appeared that
We will never walk again
As we used to walk at night,
Watching our shadows lengthen
Under the gold street-light
When the snow was new and white.
We will never walk again
Slowly, we two,
In spring when the park is sweet
With midnight and with dew,
And the passers-by are few.
I sit and think of it all,
And the blue June twilight dies,--
Down in the clanging square
A street-piano cries
And stars come out in the skies.
When my little girl plays Beethoven Sonatas,
The big, black Steinway flashes all its teeth at her
In a broad, good-natured grin:
And suddenly
I hear a deep, rumbling, beautiful roar of laughter.
Love thy piano, Oh girl,
It will give you back
Note for note
The harmonies of your soul.
It will sing back to you
The high songs of your heart.
It will give
As well as take....
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the
tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who
smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter
outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano
our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The
glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast