The Poem I Found in My Grandfather's Toolbox
He built things. He wrote about them too.
My grandfather was a carpenter, and his toolbox was the most-used object in the house. Forty years of building, of fixing, of making things with his hands. The toolbox was the thing he used, and the thing he used to write in.
I inherited the toolbox when he died, along with the watch and the ledger and the tools I still don't know how to use. The toolbox went in the garage, and for three years it sat there unopened, because I could not look at his handwriting without missing him.
When I finally opened it I found the poems. They were in the lid, written in pencil, in the spaces between the tool holders. Tiny, cramped, almost illegible poems about the wood he was working with and the things he was building and the people he was building them for.
A poem about the grain of a piece of oak that was really a poem about my grandmother. A poem about the weight of a hammer that was really about the weight of a son. A poem about the way sawdust fell in the light that was really about the way time falls on a life.
He never called them poems. He called them 'notes'. But they are poems. They are the kind of poem a man writes when he has spent his life building things and has run out of words for it.
I use the toolbox now. The tools work. The poems work better.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Similar Stories
Keep reading in the Writory Library
Enter a Writory poetry contest