The Lighthouse Keeper

You imagine yourself as the lighthouse keeper,
trudging up the steps each eveing,
before the approaching storm,
it is dark inside, with a pair of small windows
looking inland. over the waving brush.

The wind blows.
Long before the storm clouds arrive.
It is an easy thing to believe
it is another sunny day in paradise but
you have made this journey many times
to the top of the world,
enough time to know storms alway arrive

You imagine lighting the huge oil light,
a relic of another age, two bright flames
behind a polished mirror. The light begins
before the dark. Ready for the dark.

This is your job, this lighting of lamps,
this discerning between rocks and clear seas.
It is your job but it is not why you do this. No.
For you it about being able to see further,
to see the storms before the arrive and be ready,
about living with a smidge less blindness
than the mere mortal you most certainly are.

This is why you climb the tower each day,
to do the work of lighthouse keeping.
Bland and boring as it might seem to others,
to you it is something like enlightenment.

About this poem

The picture is of Nauset Lighthouse, one of the inspirations for this poem. It sits about ten miles west of where we are staying on Cape Cod this week.

There is a hurricane coming. Hurricane Lee. It is supposed to brush the cape tomorrow with winds of 70+ miles an hour. But as I write this, the skies are blue. The air is breezy and cool. Without knowing you would never know.

I am a Methodist pastor of a small church in Vermont. We pastors are supposed to know all, but the truth is we are as human as the next guy, with all the faults and foibles of humans everywhere. But we do study, We do try to learn about the storms of life before they come. To be ready.

From those things, this poem.

Tom

PS: You can get prints of this photograph here: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/nauset-lighthouse-tom-atkins.html