MASTERPIECE #3130

/// What do farmers do when they retire?
While Anne knits, Jørgen sits by the fire.
But there is no heat there
and his broken-backed chair
proves he’ll suffer but will not sit by her.

/// Jørgen’s pants are a pastiche of patches
from a dozen cloth swatches— (none matches).
And his chair’s hewn from good
solid Norwegian wood,
with a backrest that sometimes detaches.

/// Jørgen’s chair is no longer complete
‘cause he’d burned the back rails of his seat.
Though all fuel was consumed,
still, his dreaming resumed:
How to get a hot meal he could eat.

/// Meanwhile, Anne, now retired, has the time
to complete work begun in her prime.
It was knitting she’d done
for their one stillborn son.
Jørgen spoke of that death as her crime.

/// When they’d worked the farm, back-breaking striving
was the price paid for merely surviving.
Now they’re free to reflect
on the pain and neglect
that had killed love and kept them from thriving.

/// Seething schism seems shocking and strange.
An estrangement none sought to arrange.
Yet things could still improve
if one made the first move.
They are, neither one, too old to change.

/// Sixty years of toil tethered in tandem,
while enduring life’s cruelties, random,
built resentments unspoken,
but are their spirits broken?
Dying embers could flame if they fanned ‘em.

/// Long time couples with love in the heart
are “together” though seeming apart.
Silence isn’t exciting,
yet it’s better than fighting.
Giving each other “space” is an art.