DESK AND DAUGHTER

I wonder whose desk that was,

Now discarded southward, pushed

Years ago over the edge beyond

The broken cement foundation pile

Among rotting sheets of plywood

And construction projects abandoned.

Morning glory and blackberry vines

Race to embrace the fallen furniture,

Creeping quietly into drawers to peek

Into rain-soaked files spilling out,

Half-buried in among the weeds.

I wonder when she sat at this desk,

Whether she ever envisioned mere

Mortality of poorly built pressboard

Mahogany veneered cabinetry now

Forsaken. What letters, verses, memories,

Prayers, laments and loves came pouring

Forth from her fountain pen to page?

What forbidden love, secretly indulged,

Hidden desires or dreams never realized,

Confessed here upon this sacred place,

Now neglected, decaying, abandoned.

I wonder if skeletal remains of

Desks and daughters could converse

What stories they would tell,

What psalms they would chant,

What confessions they would hear,

What dreams they would dream?

The monastic cemetery rests within,

View, fewer than fifty yards away

Cloistered among evergreen trees

Gravestones marching across the grass

In well-ordered simplicity and silence.

If she could arise at midnight and

Walk those few fifty steps westward

To this site, this rejected heap,

And see again this broken form that

Once was her desk, those long years

Of psalms and service, prayers and

Redirected passions, now melted away

As morning mist that once hung heavy

Among gnarled apple trees in the orchard.

I wonder what these two would say

And how they may greet and bow
Before the Christ and each other

With enduring modesty and grace. 

~written by David Robinson