I would like to post a few words from my own grandfather, Walter Trabue. Walter died 30 years ago, when I was just 16 years old. Walter was a railroad man, a woodworker whose small garage was alive with the smell of cherry and walnut lumber. Walter occasionally kept a journal, and these are a couple of excerpts from them.
Untitled essay, 1970
Thru the forest paths our trails were crossed by
white men,
which before were traveled by wild animals and
red men.
Those trails have sprung into ribbons of concrete
reaching from ocean to ocean,
villages have spawned cities of great sizes.
Where once were fields of grass or woods
cornfields came and went,
and now houses.
Houses, no woods as once I played in
or fields where my uncle rode horses.
No more are things as of the old days
of my boyhood,
even the place where I was born is gone.
Will all things change with time?
The Old Pine Tree
WL Trabue, July 1945
Come, Love, let us wander again, along
the Old Trail
Up the mountain trail as we did long years ago.
Beneath those long shadows of our youth and the
Old Pine Tree,
side by side as we did when we were younger.
Remember the parting, how sad it was to
You and I.
Our country called, the call I had to answer.
Come, Love, we must go again along
that Old Trail
to find the love we left there long ago.
I haved dreamed of this trail, at night
Far Away,
and feared I would never see it again.
Let me feel its bark again, it is still there!
The Two Hearts,
As ours, they have entwined over these missing years.
4 comments:
Wow! Your grandfather was an exceptional poet. Thank you for sharing these.
Thanks for sharing the beautiful words, Dan.
I love this kind of thing. You know, as long as there is an internet, those words your grandfather scribbled, perhaps for no one's eyes but his own, perhaps for some friends, who knows, will live on, and a small piece of him will live on, as well. I really believe that. A man who lived and died completely outside my consciousness is not a part of my memory and life, a glimpse of his emotional life something for me to ponder. You have given your readers a precious gift; your grandfather, too - a kind of immortality, really.
"Where once were fields of grass or woods
cornfields came and went"
Those words were a reminder of my own journeys as a child to my grandparents before the days of the interstate. About an 8 hour trek from Houston up near the Oklahoma border. We passed rich cotton fields all along the way in those days.
My husband and I made that same trek a few years ago. I wanted to see how things had changed. A very long and lonely way it was. The cotton fields long since gone. I wondered where they went. Was anyone growing cotton in Texas these days?
Things never stay the same do they?
Nice poetry. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you all for the thoughts.
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