Simple Pleasures (rev)

Formerly: The Simple Pleasures That You Bring

Do you mind I try and write some lines
for you tonight? I’m fuelled for sure, a bit
ebullient perhaps – now there’s a word
too truly hard to find a rhyme to suit!

I’ll try, but time will take a pensive break,
prescribe unruly chance to make its telling
consequence. Am I afraid of you? Why yes.
Why is it so – how else should it be?

You are a figment from a past I never really
knew, so Arctic bright in suns which never
set, connecting parts of histories compressed
with ease – redressed complete into this day.

A past in which my son will bask in eminence,
a past which now has never passed. And if I
ever asked a chance to greet the making of
your graciousness I never made the meeting.

I take instead the simple pleasures that you
bring to place as treasured offerings amongst
the rings and ribbons, with the trinkets lying
there, with the things I’ve yearned to share;

Grandpa’s foreign words in childhood memories
ancient deeds of antique clans which reached us
in our daily lives, derived in poetry and melody,
consummate in harmonies which say I care.

I never dared to lend my heart before, my head
was always offered up a sacrifice instead – a price
severe in time’s etheric scars. But that is past. And
now you join our family, we gladly welcome you

with open arms, our hearts disarmed in greeting,
it is a magic meeting of a past we never knew
first hand, of parts uniting in your golden glow –
a past that’s now enshrined in you.
© 10 February 2006, I.D. Carswell

For my Daughter-in-Law Frida