Claudia’s Gift

Gilded statutes point the way with their gaze
Through Spanish moss arbors
Draped on ancient oaks
Who always listen and keep in their boughs memories
Of
Fried chicken picnics and tossing legs bones to alligators for fun
And excitement
The sound of the Super 8 tick, tick, tick
Reeling black and white recollections 
Prancing bee hive red heads and Christmas present
Antics unwrapped
Flickering
Of the great family explosion
Death
Marked by tombs stones one, two, three
Then and now
Yet these hollowed bridleways sustained you
Then
Strolls on a summer day beneath gargantuan granite gods
And musing fountains 
Telling tales of larger worlds and beliefs
To shield you
Gardens of stone poetry
Meeting you with promises
Of beautiful roses and tender assurances
Pledges of gods and God’s
Brush as real then as the careful breezes 
And terrible tears 
Diminishing into the sand under
Tough, unyielding Bermuda grass
Growing then
And now
You remain kept
In the reminiscences of that place, that restful, private sanctuary
Even the faintest music of spilling fountains
And fading etchings
And half remembered rhymes
Uphold you now
And me
For these are your favors 
The fuel of muse and wonder
Poets and painters
Nurses and writers
Programmers and preachers
To cast their lot
In the brook green stream