John Walter Senior built a riverboat
to bring upriver eastern freight
and rough-hewn lumber down.
On Saturdays he swept her decks
and called for courting men and women
to climb the narrow steps and hammer
the hardwood planks of the upper deck
with waltzes, fox-trot and reckless polka.
Long years later, John William Walter,
dirt-farmer son of the boat-builder father,
pried free the top-deck hardwood
to floor a large, new farmhouse.
No more log-walled, dirt-floored,
bachelor squalor now that he'd married,
now that he had someone to dance with
here on the sweat-moist, dust-caked farm. | LISTEN to this poem:
|
|
