Saving in the Silence

You have the place to yourself,
the old country store
that once lived across the road
from your grandfather’s farm.

It is still there. A museum now,
the kind of museum where someone has to let you in,
never really open
except to the truly curious.

And so, you have the place to yourself,
this place without clocks,
full of the things you bought
three generations ago.

Most fascinating are the potions
and the promises each made, Saviors in a bottle,
full of a fantastical array of claims and cures
not unlike the internet, but not as noisy,

each in their own bottle, each with a label
that reads like a book of magic.
We laugh at them now, no matter
that we are little different,

susceptible to a whole new generation
of charlatans with better technology to sell,
brighter and louder and with more reach
but the same old snake oil, too willing

to abandon the true things, the less exciting,
things of ancient wisdoms and the original God,
who quietly still works in the background
ignoring the noise, saving in the silence.

About this poem

The picture was taken at the Rogers Store Museum in Surry country, Va. It is just across one corner of what was once my grandfather’s farm.

I am in the annual, or nearly annual process of simplifying work and workflow. Uncomplicating what I seem to complicate with experiments and wonderings each year, more often than not, just as in my life, finding the old ways have wisdom to them.

Tom