(Today's photo is a worm's eye view of some hyacinths which caught my attention while I was walking in Lincoln Park)
Memory is such a part of poetry - whether of something seen or envisioned, whether long ago or just moments earlier. Memory plays its role.
In this instance, the memory was implanted so long ago I don't know exactly where or when I saw the sofa sitting on that front porch. It had to have been in my childhood, which would have placed it somewhere in a small town in Southern Illinois.
I remember how the light played across it, how I wondered what its story was, why it was sitting on that porch, neglected, but not really abandoned.
That image stayed with me, followed me, all these years until, finally, I put it to paper and, in doing that, gave it a life of its own. Perhaps it will now stir some memories for someone else, this tattered old sofa "where so many secrets still lie ... "
The poem:
PURPLE
Deep-purple couch sitting alone
in the darkness of the front porch,
lamplight threading a cracked
windowpane, settling like dust
across your back, cushions askew,
butt-sprung, cold, where suitors sat
enduring eternity, waiting, waiting
for that moment that never came,
where others, home from the wars,
found prickly refuge in your embrace,
slept nights away, bone-weary, safe,
where the sick found solace,
baby first slept, generations of cats
yawned, stretched, sank regal claws,
where so many secrets still lie
like lost coins, just beyond reach.© 1998
(originally published in Potpourri)
Today's word: lamplight
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