Poem: The Dinner Table

The Dinner Table

The table is set and quiet
as the sun outside falls behind the quarry walls,
its weak orange light flickering like fire in the windows.

You good china sits silently,
waiting perhaps for good company, or
a lover to come in the night,

and sip spring wine with you in candle light,
soft and kind like memory,
softening all it touches

with grace and warmth. You wait,
silent as silverware, for your company,
not knowing who will arrive

and whether the dinner conversation
will sparkle, or fly with sparks,
and you are left with the anticipation

of a child whose father drinks into the night,
a nervous sort of anticipation
half wonderment, half dread,

counting somehow on the fine china
and gentle light to make things
right.

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The photograph is of my dining room at Quarry House. You can click on it for a larger version.

Tom

Poem: At Home in Strange Places

At Home in Strange Places

You open the door to a new place,
to new smells and silences,
where there are no familiar paths
and there is fog, everywhere.

You step onto the porch and wonder
at the magnitude of change, realizing
this is not just a move from one house to another,
but a move of spirit

where, for a time, everything will be shrouded
in the fog that surrounds you,
where the internal compass that has become so comfortable
from fifty years in the same place
now spins wildly, and there is no certainty.

Your eye scans for a horizon, and finds none;
for landmarks, and again... none
save a lone tree in the distant field,
bare and stripped by harsh winters
a faint and grey beacon.
You button your coat against the cold,

and walk boldly into the morning of mist,
unsure, but unafraid, sure only
that God's March morning will, in her own time,
reveal all.

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The picture was taken in Rupert, Vermont. You can click on it for a larger version.

Tom