Time-honored Portrait of out Great Grandfather

Exhumed from Time's dark coffin

to linger on in perpetuity. Mortal

lines traced on brokered canvas,

framed by posts of organic wood,

bracing.a life stilled in its prime,

foreshadowing an endeared

chain of lives, while baring a

shrine to long forgotten days

 

The passe portrait towers

over our furnished mantle.

A prescience streaming from

the strokes of an itinerant

painter, anointed with

time-honored oil,

his patronage to keep;

the middle-aged visage

of our great grandfather

 

In his formal pose obscuring

the toil of harder days, while

sharing the dignity of virtuous

ways

A stolid, Victorian figure that

shrouds our carefree steps

with a solemnity. A mysterious

facade clouds the interred mind

of  the patriarch who blankly stares

over the precipice at his wistful

caretakers, unmoved by the threads

of his own provenance, nor captivated

by the nostalgic glare of his prodigy.

 

An icon not cherished for his salient

strain or sentient reserves, but venerated

for the grade of his burnished title

Reincarnated not to extend his mortality,

only to commemorate the now sterile

tissue encoded in the flesh that he'll

never touch with his hands or feel

in his heart.