Relics Rhymed

I’m verily inspired by potsherds and beach glass, coal fragments, and other detritus churned up on Rosslyn’s waterfront. Or disinterred from the yard while planting a garden or building a stone wall. I stall awhile and meditate on the process of fragmenting and the potential for reimagining artifacts. I wonder about dark or damaged backstories, sharp shards mollified by time’s palliative pressure into “worry beads” carried and caressed like the glass glob I kept in my pocket for several years as a totem, a talisman, a pocket palliative for angst. I imagine delightful detritus strung into necklaces, assembled in mosaics, relics rhymed in song, or puzzle-pieced into a poem.

Relics Rhymed

I gather fragments
wrought asunder by
great gusts, gales, and
tempestuous tantrums
of feuding forces,
jagged shards tumbled
in the roiling surf,
defanged, lenified,
smoothed, polished, and rhymed
by the tides of time,
memory’s meager
mitigating reach. 

A runaway run-on identifying as a poem, a piece of a poem, a poetry puzzle piece, a poet-sherd,…

Make of it what you wish.

Those last two lines are a piece of what I’ve been wrestling with in so many ways. How does the past extend into the present? To and through the bits and pieces proffered by history, inherited evidence of a long before, timeless tidbits ostensibly proving our place in the river of life and death, creation and destruction? Do these artifacts salve us?

Many questions. Few answers.

Wanting wonder, I’ll simply allow that — as so often — relics rhymed.