Still Standing - July 29 2022

 

Still Standing

July 29 2022

The barn board was a nice touch.

Wide planks of weathered wood

with a warm patina

of brownish grey.

Each piece was unique,

hand-planed boards

that had warped and shrunk over time;

character

no clever laminate

or faux plastic slab

could reproduce.

Stressed wood

hewn from old growth trees

that grew here for millennia

once.

Rare hardwood

from virgin forest

before the clear-cuts stripped them bare,

densely grained

impressively tough.

While today's trees are bred for speed

and a quick buck;

they grow fast, but spindly,

and cannot be counted on

for the long haul.

This is how to age gracefully, I thought,

outlasting the hardship

of a long eventful life.

To somehow survive

fire and pests

exposure and neglect

the cruel elements.

To stand

companions by your side.

To simply not fall down.

Yet still be beautiful,

but with the gravitas of years.

They don't make them like that anymore.

And seeing the survivors

of the 20th century's only good war

I thought the same.

The bent and crippled backs.

Weathered faces

like the worn leather

of well-worked baseball mitts,

uniform jackets

hanging limply

on shrunken frames.

Shaky canes, in gnarled hands

tightly gripped ,

their bulbous knuckles

unnaturally big

under thin shiny skin.

But still standing

with a fierce light in their eyes.

And beautiful

in their dignified way.

Looking good

against the smooth fresh faces

of the restless school kids

there to pay their respects.

Setting out, I figured this might turn out to be a poem about surviving the vicissitudes of age, as well as our culture's lack of respect for the old.

Or at least a poem about character, uniqueness, and the pricelessness of time's passage.

So the turn it took surprised me as well. And since it strikes me as cheating to whipsaw the reader without any foreshadowing at all — cheating because it has a strong impact, but is a little too easy — my original choice of title perhaps over-compensated and gave too much away: The Greatest Generation. Still Standing, on the other hand, is indeterminate enough to invite a reader in, and also helps tie together the two parts of the poem: the old growth trees, and the tough grizzled veterans.