Amy Kitchener's
Angels Without Wings Foundation
Presents the 2008
Michigan
Senior Poet Laureate
Laurence W. Thomas
CHOICES
I had no way of knowing what he would have kept nor what I would miss
after he left home and I moved into a smaller place, but there were choices to
be made. Accumulations endear themselves to everyone differently, their
value never measured by their worth but tested on an individual scale of
sentiment: the violin he did so poorly on, his old blue bicycle bought with his
father who made him feel as if he had paid for it from hisSaturday Evening
Post route earnings. A German army helmet creased by a bullet saw service
in the back yard wars with his cousin, his enemy, his friend. He would never
miss the plaster of Paris bison, carved in art class, the African papier mache
mask he made with a bone inserted through the hair. I kept the sweet
perfunctory letters he was forced to write from camp. I had to choose. Some
things were easy and brought no more pain than deciding if their usefulness
were at an end or there simply would be no room for them. Books we read
together, dog eared but precious to me for his scribblings in them, had to go.
Maybe the Good Will found suitable homes for them along with our old
furniture. It was hard going through his closet, the chaos in the garage, and
there was so much junk in the basement I assigned low prices to it all when I
had my yard sale. He will come some day, not claiming anything, it won't be
like that, but to see in person what my letters had told him. He will ask,
perhaps, what happened to his bed with the built-in shelves and drawers and
about his pictures or maybe in his sarcastic way he'll ask ifI had saved
anything and I will tell him only that choices had to be made.
Laurence W. Thomas
Ypsilanti, Michigan
Ypsilanti, Michigan
