(A) Carpenter

[Timothy Gega]

(A) Carpenter

Jesus swept!

It is the duty of every Carpenter at the end of the day on every job.
If he didn’t (sweep) he couldn’t eat, (feed his family)
or his good reputation (for future referrals) might be robbed.

Some Master carpenters were good and were called the “Chrestos, ”(“Christ”-opher)
and he constructed things with his hands from the spirits of ancient tree ghosts.

But don’t look at this carpenter from the end of a common broom.
Without his tools and skills one wouldn’t be sitting on a chair or inside a room.

If not for the skills, imagination and tools of this trade,
Mankind today would be still living in a cold damp, dark cave.
Generally treated like a servant or a common mutt,
in his onlyness with nature he built the first man-hut.
But that wouldn’t do, he didn’t stop there,
he built the first dining table, a desk and a fine sturdy chair.

Besides sweeping and cutting and all of that, the carpenter sported many other hats,
They became geniuses at carving trees just for the thrill of the crack of a ball on a bat.

It was Cupid’s Love Bow and Arrow that he had whittled and made
so it could outrace to the target against the slow wielded warrior’s steel blade.

The thought of the wheel really wasn’t so hard to invent,
he just cut off a tree-round and off down the hill it went.
And getting that tiny little lead inside the wooden pencil was also time well spent.

And what of those fighting Spanish Crusaders and the old fishing Portuguese?
Carpenters built those long ships for sailors to travel away on the ocean’s breeze.

And, was it also the carpenter that invented the first Belgian waffle
in the Netherlands circa 14th century,
or the Cornelius Swartwout family lineage
that goes back to the Dutch Low Countries
When he designed the non-slip waffle-head hammer? Perhaps not!

And, speaking of sweeping up sawdust at the end of his day,
was it the Chinese Carpenter who first swept all his sawdust away
into some spilled starchy rice-water on his new kitchen bamboo Pergo
that invented the first sheets of paper over 5 thousand years ago? Yeah!

And once again on each winter’s long cold haul
what else can the craftsman do to pay his dues
but write some whimsical woodsy-wordy poems
to prevent his own cabin fever, or avert his seasonal affective disorder Blues?

Swinging a hammer is like throwing an axe,
It requires a lot of finesse but not much syntax.

1 house, 2 house, 3 house, 4,
pretty soon a community will be knocking at your door.
5, 6, 7, and 8, economies will thrive when flipping real estate.
9, 10, 11, 12, time to put this silly poem back up on the shelve.


©2015 Tim Gega