Poem: Auction

Auction

They are selling everything,
the furniture, worn with use,
the paintings, dusty and faded with age,
every pot and pan,
all of your life in things
exposed out of context,
held up to a "what will you give?",
a life dispersed,
no longer held together
by spirit and soul,

scattered,
each stranger here,
for the price of a few dollars
carrying a part of you home,
a tool, a glass horse, china,
to keep with a new meaning,
or sell themselves,
setting your life even more adrift.

A few perhaps are here to grasp
a piece of you to remember,
a lamp, a rug for the fire, a teapot,
something to keep your memory
brighter, to capture a flicker
of you and let it dance
in their homes,

but at the end of the day, the last
trunk is sold. The walls are empty.
The house echos hollowly,
and you are only a ghost,
your haunting thinned by the auction,
but somehow,
never quite extinguished,

your spirit lingering,
like a face in the glass,
reflected, ready, waiting
for something uncertain,
for some one bright, worn, and new.

=======================

Yesterday Rona and I went to an estate auction (where the picture was taken.), where much to my surprise, I met a friend of mine, another writer, who along with his artist wife, is buying the house and farm that was being sold in front of our eyes.

The juxtaposition between watching everything this 103 year old woman had owned being sold, and listening to my friend talk about their plans for the farm struck me, and from it, burbling through the night, came this poem, the only thing I brought home yesterday.

You can click on the image for a larger version.

Tom