Hopping Aboard the Poetry Train - 1

Well, it was bound to happen. Let me dust the notebooks off and see what I can dig up.

Oh, here we go. Something I did for my grandparents' 45th wedding anniversary, the year after I graduated high school (24 years ago!) This is the grandma I live with, who plays piano and had the fiddler and guitarist come over for a kitchen party a few weeks ago.

My grandfather was a portrait photographer, oil painter of landscapes and Cheticamp rug hooker.


The Artisans

Time fashions its pearls
Beneath crusted grey shells
The milky white salve
Lifting sand from the tender flesh
A simple act of survival
Creating precious jewels
To be opened
Polished
Strung together
And displayed
A wonder of time preserved

Spears of light pierce the trees
Penetrating the transparent pane
Of transformed sand
The grains quickened to molten elixir
And frozen in a thin sheet
Looking in on two
Who greet the day
As two living pearls
Their time together, creating treasures
From the grains of the world

Two hands that clasped on a morning
Two faces that turned to a future
Overlooking a sea
They jumped into without answers
Waters that raged
Inlets becalmed

Two pearls who emerge from the ocean of time
To see with the eyes of that morning
The wonderful ripples their plunge could create
To feel the remarkable pulse
Of those whose existence
Began first with them
With the smiles they gave each other
With the echoes they felt
When they first looked in each others' eyes

Days spent
Time shared
Lives fashioned
From the grains of the world

Copyright,1983 Julia Smith