Salvage Furniture

Our home is full of second hand furniture, some donated by friends, some gleaned from junk yards and charity auctions. One such piece is a beautiful dining table. Miss Molly as you see likes lying under it.

And when I don't know what to write a poem about I look around and try to recall what yarn, this time figurative, I have learned about my precious salvage.

So here's a poem in memory of Mick and Pat who bought the table, maybe in the forties or fifties.

The Cabriole Legged Table

(A cabriole is a ballet jump performed only by men in which the dancer beats the calves together and leaps in the air with a scissors like movement)

 They would have chosen it together

Not perhaps without a quarrel or two

Though she would have deferred to his judgement

 

It was she however who walked every pay day from Clearys down O’Connell Street and along the quays to Lawlors or wherever it was held in storage

until the five shillings and sixpence a week, or whatever it was,

all added up to the cost of a mahogany extending dining room table

with cabriole scroll leafed legs and ball and claw feet.

 

It was carried home, its bevelled apron straining

to expand,

its carved feathered legs itching

to leap.

 

It was never extended to its full flight capacity

The drop leaf central leaf in permanent fold

The apartment being too small

And smaller still the Croydon flat

where he tied it upside down to the ceiling

when they emigrated to an even smaller coop.

 

But he made good

And decades later it would make its flight path home and eventually

to you where it sits in state, its wings at full span, the internet on its back,

 

Holding up the world.

Copyright 2022 Cathy Leonard All rights reserved