Clapboards

My grandfather was a sharecropper
and when he moved into the farmhouse
nothing there had paint. Not the homestead,
not the barns.

He began to paint, almost as soon as he moved in.
White for the house. Dark red for the barns.
So hungry and empty were the clapboards
that after two coats, you could barely tell
he had spent the summer on ladders with brushes.
It took four coats and two years.

I know the feeling, in the changes of my own life,
the hunger for love and touch and words,
the need that has to be filled before the need can be filled,
and like him in the years after, the maintenance,
new coat after new coat, vowing never to return
to the emply clapboards of life.

About this poem

The part of about my grandfather is biographical. The rest is about all of us who have felt empty for too long, and have rebuilt (or are rebuilding) lives. It takes work. Time and the imagination to believe it can be something better. Faith. Persistance. Finding meaning .Poetry is never about one thing.

The picture is a local barn.

Tom