The Old Stone House

On Getting Older

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My grandfather was a reader, a writer, and a Methodist pastor. I remember attending his church a few times when I was young—each sermon began with a joke, a way of relaxing the audience for the serious but hopeful message ahead.

When he died I put his framed poem on the wall of my studio. It must have been printed in a local newspaper somewhere in small-town Kansas. The newsprint is now brown and faded—fitting for the poem’s subject.

Since today’s Poetry Comics Month theme is “Collaboration,” I decided to use some of my grandfather’s words for a cross-generational poetry comics collaboration.

I love the mystery of old houses. The memories they hold, the secrets they keep. The more derelict a once-grand house, the better the stories it conjures. A house is more than a house, of course. It’s a metaphor for our own fragile, temporary nature; our ability to withstand the storms of life. And there will be storms.

Today is my birthday. The last one of my thirties. Strange how that happens so quickly. I’m thinking about how to spend my next decade, and what I want to do in the year before I turn 40. A vacation overseas? A raucous book tour? A blow-out karaoke party?

Here’s a poem I wrote after my grandfather’s funeral in Mankato, Kansas in winter 2020—right before the pandemic flipped the world on its head.

I think I know what I’ll do with this coming year and the decade to follow: I’ll spend more quiet hours writing. Trying to capture the world in all its ephemeral beauty.

Funeral

My young sons 
bounce about the cemetery
like a playground,
climbing tall headstones,
hurdling low ones,
pulling up clumps
of dormant yellow grass,
shouting and sprinting and spinning
as adults stand solemn 
in rarely-worn suits
under prairie pines 
and pale blue Kansas sky.

I watch them until
I’m thinking of nothing
but what is right NOW.

We drive home. 
Night is coming soon.
A sunset like a prairie fire illuminates the sky.