Something Borrowed, Something Beautiful

Today I’m not tired or lazy, but have had a full work day and yoga and a morning workout, so I guess I’m a little tired but my mind is alive. Yesterday morning I awoke even before my alarm to hear Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. And as I lay there, alert and breathing in the new day, he offered a poem that I found so beautiful it deserves reprinting here. I also have to say that the cadence in which this poem is written and read is in a style much like mine. Perhaps it makes me sound egotistical to write that but it’s meant in terms of how I relate to its sound, the words and feeling. It’s not about greatness, it’s about relating.


Even after taking to the sound of the poem, it took me a little while to wonder why I kept thinking about it even into today—and I finally got it. This poem is about my own parents, a different generation than described in the poem, but the warmness of a child speaking of her parents, when young is the way I envision mine, still married and I think still in love, after so many years. They have not hit 50 yet but some of the details here remind me of their life and how very much I love them. It’s a blessing to have a lifetime of what they have...


Golden

by Sonia Gernes

(for my parent's fiftieth anniversary)

In the old photographs, it is always autumn.
Colors fade to the sepia of remembered thought:
my mother in a flapper dress, my father
proud beside the Model A. They glow
in the light of dreams that I can never know.

What did they think of that autumn
they climbed into the photograph of bride & groom?
That love would conquer?—the Depression yield
more than its tart and scanty fruit?
In a season of scarceness, the bitter root

of her father's death fresh within the house,
they strode from the church believing
in sunlight—the prairie ringing for them,
the October trees all aflame with praise.
Good farmers, they knew how to raise

the future, a steady hand on each day's plow,
patience in the fallow fields, a table
big enough for all who'd need it, hope
in the seedlings, beauty's grace, a faith
that is the opposite of winter's death.

This autumn, I would take the color
of that triumph, the bright praise of trees.
the harvest secure in the heart's high bins;
I would make of them a portrait fit to hold
through time: these trees, these lives, this gold.

"Golden" by Sonia Gernes, from What You Hear in the Dark.