Waeringscir

image borrowed from tess kinkaid

Waeringscir

“Did the Warwickshire militia teach the Irish to drink beer,

or did they learn from the Irish how to drink whiskey?”

--Maria Edgeworth.

My beloved pipe-smoking grandfather, 

on my father’s side, never lost his British

accent, & he never tired of telling we

grandchildren wonderful stories of his youth

in Warwickshire, a county in the West Midlands;

always proud of the fact that he had grown up

in a county that had been the birthplace of

Shakespeare & George Eliot.

He had a framed lithograph hanging in the living

room, all bright reds & yellows, depicting the County

flag, an upright bruin wearing a thick collar, chained

to a tall stump, bristling with amputated branch stubs--

symbolic, said Gramps, of the ancient forest of Arden,

that was clear-cut during the industrial revolution.

He lived in Warwick, and the young woman he loved,

Mary Lou Gibbs, lived fifty miles away in Henley-in-Arden.

Queen Victoria was still on the throne in 1899, when

my grandfather, a callow youth of 17, sent a love letter

to the young lady, who later was to become our

grandmama--Mary. 

She had kept that letter, and he was fond of bringing

it out to show us how precious it was; 1900 was the

postmark date marked over a one penny Queen Vic

stamp, all black & pink.

The letter contained a love poem, we were told, but

he would never read it to us; only after he died in 1977,

did my father let me read it; Beauty and Beauty by

Rupert Brooke. I still recall part of the first verse:

When Beauty and Beauty meet

All naked, fair and fair,

The earth is crying sweet,

And scattering bright the air;

I’ve always wanted to travel to Britain

and visit Warwickshire; especially to see 

the Grand Union Canal that extends navigation

north of the river Avon, from Stratford to Warwick--

and see in person those hundreds of brightly

colored narrow boats that are moored along it.

In the interim, I have become the family custodian

of the Love Letter, 

& I do enjoy staring at it on quiet Sundays, swearing 

that I can actually hear the river bubbling over the weir, 

& church belles ringing all over the shire. 

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over at the MAG 194

Would you like to hear the author read this poem to you?