Thomas Strunk

Piano for Sale

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The old piano will need to be sold.
The dust has gathered on its black white keys,
the top lid cluttered high with magazines
and music books unread, their notes still scrolled,
the bench littered with more than it should hold.
The girls stopped playing years ago, gently
I stroke the flats and sharps and middle C.
I pause and feel the loneliness of old.
For months untouched, no sound no joy has come.
She left her music sheet, the Pathetique,
She could play it clean, she could play it cold,
could leave your lonesome heart shaken and numb.
She’s gone now, it’s okay, we bought it cheap.
The old piano may need to be sold.

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Thoughts in Church on Mother’s Day

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I don’t know my grandmother’s name.
She died before I was born. And
my mom died
when I was young,
so I never got to ask
what it was like to live
motherless so long.

Did she curse the years?
Each birthday a pang of sorrow,
each mother’s day a stroke of grief
or anger across the years
for how her mom abandoned her,
dropped off, an infant,
at her grandparents’ small farm?

She found joy there on the outskirts
of town among the woods and fields,
and the people who loved her,
until she was eight
when her parents, rank strangers,
came to take her back.

My mother always told
how she missed the mountains
and hated the city, Camden,
where her father worked in the shipyards.
When she was old enough
she dropped out of high school
and returned to the Pocono Mountains.

I don’t know my grandmother’s name.
She died before I was born.
It is no small matter,
though still easily discovered I imagine.

Yet what cannot be found
in any archive, not in any newspaper
obituary, is how my mother learned
to live motherless so young.

It was not the wisdom
I thought I would need
the summer I turned twenty-one.