Issue Twelve - March 2008

Guitar Propped Upright in My Study Corner

By John Sangster

Mother’s violin waits in the attic,
wondering if it remembers how to sing.
Father’s songs (It meant he was happy)
hang in the air.
Grandmother’s Victrola beckons.
Thick 78’s: Caruso, Bix, and Bing.
Crank me, it said.
That cowboy who played the saw
at the Palomar Theatre,
the family spinet and boogie-woogie
on the black keys.
In my study corner, steel strings,
curving lines of spruce and rosewood.
All the years,
how we lullabied the babies,
danced the dancers,
found ourselves at daybreak
still singing.

Copyright 2008 John Sangster

John Sangster lives on Lopez Island. His work has appeared in several issues of SHARK REEF. His chapbook, Island Year, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008. While working on a memoir about a one-year trip he and his wife took across North America, a number car poems began to appear. Those combined with earlier car poems might one day become a chapbook.

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