Old Man’s Sand

Kickass, the doorstop dog, says that as the keeper and his granddaughter Sarah pawed through the refuge of his misspent journalistic life, some strange items surfaced, such as the “hour-glass” poem he wrote on Sanibel Island many years ago after seeing an old man sitting on his porch smoking a pipe.  The keeper does not smoke a pipe but he sure as hell is old.  The keeper would like to think the “poem” was written on company time, but he cannot be sure.. (Facebook will not preserve the hourglass shape of the poem, but maybe the blog will.)

SAND AND SMOKE

The old man sits like stone,

Smoking his pacifier pipe,

Looking back through

The smoke of his life,

His, but not really his.

It drained as sand

Never pausing

Steadily

Going.

Now

He

Sees

There was

Not a pattern,

No real plan to it,

Nothing he could have

Done to really change the

Way it flowed to this point.

Or was there?  The question

Leaves him hollow, and aching

For more time to savor the answer .