Not a Museum 

Nothing in your house is new.
It is a museum
of other people’s pasts,

your grandfather’s trunk,
a legend that now holds your own legends,
love letters and notes
from strangers and intimate hearts

somehow touched
by your blundering kindness.

The drawing table once lived
in a poor man’s plantation, having seen
slavery and wars, a South that fell and rose again,
before being regulated
to rot in the dark

amid hay and bridles,
until, as an afterthought,
it was pulled out, sold at auction
and brought here to live again.

Chairs that were gifts and
chairs bought despite their brokenness,
resurrected and more precious for it.

These are not museum pieces. No.
They are worn, full of scars, pockmarked
from bad behavior and frustration,
but their patina shines bright in the afternoon sun,

and they carry a beauty,
not unlike yours,
far richer than the new, a beauty
of tales yet untold, and tales
yet lived,

Survivors, not antiques,
whose swan song is not yet in sight,
but instead combine, eras and scars,
patina and promise,

to make something more:
a future.

About this poem

Look closely. This is my art studio and it’s rarely this neat. Creativity, as they say, is messy.

My house is full of antiques. Many were broken, worn and tired when I bought them, and I slowly brought them back to life, using skills learned from my father a generation ago. These are not the frilly fragile antiques you might find with “do not touch”  signs on them in museums. No, they are antiques that have been used, and are used every day. You can sit on my chairs, set your coffee on my tables, and live.

Our lives are the same. Often battered. Aging, sometimes well, sometimes less well, we are more beautiful for our scars. Antiques whose past is less precious than their future, whose beauty lives in today.

Tom