Granddad's Occasional Poetry

An homage to the man whose name I am honoured to bear

"I always loved the poems Granddad read
out loud to me before I went to bed."

I come by my love of poetry honestly. It’s a multi-generational passion, passed down through the family from at least as far back as my grandfather’s generation.

My experience of my grandfather’s poetry—both that which he read to me and that which was written by him—also lies behind my enthusiastic agreement with

Jesse Keith Butler

’s suggestion that “writing occasional poems to share with your friends is a practice we should be working to revive”, since that’s exactly what my grandfather and his many brothers and sisters did, enthusiastically writing and sharing occasional poems with one another and with those around them.

So, it was delightful to discover today, a number of my granddad’s poems, some of which I’d seen before and many of which I hadn’t, in a box on an upper shelf in my mother’s closet. At the top of the box were my grandfather’s World War I medals, which I think he had only ever shown to me once, reluctantly.

Near the top of the pile of poetry were a couple of my favourite of his occasional pieces. One was a poem that he wrote about the “Good Eats Cafe” in Wells, BC, near the old gold-rush town of Barkerville, located at that time (I believe) in one of those triangular-shaped corner buildings. If I remember my family history correctly, after my granddad gave the proprietors of the cafe the poem he had written in praise of the meal he had had there, they actually used the poem in their promotional materials.

                    THE GOOD EATS CAFE

     The Good Eats Cafe - we spelled out the name, 
     The building we knew could not give it fame;
     It had weathered the years - a triangular frame.
     We entered its portal with many a doubt, 
     But our fears had vanished before we came out!
     If the house was three-cornered, the meals were SQUARE, 
     With relish we tackled delectable fare!
     If ever you're travelling the Barkerville-way, 
     Stop in at Wells, at the Good Eats Cafe.
     This we can say (for we've tried it, we're sure!)
     You'll never regret passing in through its door.

The other was an inadvertently prophetic poem which he wrote and submitted to the local newspaper in 1950 when the first bridge to connect Kelowna and Westbank (now West Kelowna) was just being proposed. Here are the first four stanzas of that poem, published here mainly to prove that my granddad was a prophet! (I jest, of course, as I’m sure he would want me to point out.)

     A bridge to bind the east and west, 
     To bear the traffic on its breast.
     To stretch a hand from shore to shore 
     Like brothers that will part no more.

     No pioneer in wildest dream
     Conceived such a fantastic scheme!
     At least he kept it from his kind 
     Till faded from his fevered mind.

     Yet now the people talk and think 
     In soberness of such a link
     Then Westbank, if it span the tide 
     Could soon annex the other side.

     Kelowna, true, might not agree, 
     Might have its own designs, you see;
     But for development and growth
     A bridge would benefit them both.

But it was even more delightful to find what appears to be a poem that he wrote to welcome my mother, who comes from flat and frozen Manitoba, to rainy Lower Mainland BC:

                    WELCOME TO MARY

     Mary [from the prairie], we welcome you here;
     You come from a region so barren and drear, 
     So frigid and snow-bound it's hard to conceive 
     Why the rest of the people don't get up and leave.

     But perhaps this betrays how little we know 
     Of the country October leaves buried in snow!
     Where the rays of warm sunshine long before June
     Burn through the crusts of the snow-drifts by noon!

     Where the winding Red River, so famous in song, 
     Ere the summer is over has broken the thong 
     Which binds it securely from Autumn to May 
     When its shackle is shattered to grind on its way.

     From far Minnesota, traversing the plain 
     That provides us with flour, and grows us our grain;
     Grinding along 'til its red waters pour
     Their crumbled ice burden on Winnipeg's shore.

     Welcome to Surrey, to its balmy, soft air!
     What if its rain-drops are never quite rare!
     Never in winter - in summer they're gone,
     And winter is over ere it's fairly begun!

     We welcome you, Mary - more welcome, indeed, 
     Than rain-laden breezes that arrest and impede 
     The cold Arctic masses which push from the Pole, 
     Envelope the prairies in part, or the whole!

And this one, which he apparently wrote after a walk with my dad on Long Beach. Granddad always did love going for walks— and the ocean— and nature, which always spoke to him of his Creator, so this poem seems particularly representative of him:

               Long Beach - Washington
               (Ted and I on evening stroll
                         20th August 1963)

     Amid the bearded dunes we tread
          That lie between the town and sea;
     The twinkling star-lights overhead, 
     The flames of beach-fires glowing red, 
     Cast mystic light on sands that spread
          For miles along the sea!

     The breaking surf rolls up the shore 
          To see how far its force can go;
     Each gleaming crest with foam is hoar, 
     With forward tilt they spill and pour, 
     Then slow, to creepingly explore
          Beyond the previous flow.

     As each recedes it leaves a wake
          Of sodden sand, on this we tread, 
     To watch them swell, and surge, and break,
     To listen to the sound they make -
     Their spray has tinged each breath we take -
          But now we seek our bed.

     From town we marked the lights that shine, 
          The fourth one, bright, will guide us home -
     Ah, is there a lesson here, Divine?
     Is it within a scope of mine
     To shine across the waste - or Thine, 
          To guide a lost one Home?

And then, on a small slip of paper, written in the spidery hand of my granddad in his old age, I found two occasional poems that were much more personal. The first is about a plexiglass bird-feeder we hung from the lowest branch of the huge big-leaf maple that dominated the yard of my childhood home (where he and my grandma lived for a while in our basement suite), strategically placed so that granddad could look out and watch the birds that we hoped would come and feed from it.

     To Be Tacked On Tree For Birds To Read!

     Come birdies, come all, which hear the glad call
     Come to the feeder that hangs on the tree
          To all who are feathered
          For you it is tethered
     To a low southern limb of the big maple tree
          The seed you'll discover below the glass cover
     So it cannot be wetted by rain-drops you see.
     Each birdie that pleases is welcome that seizes,
     A beak or a cropful that flies to the tree.

And, even more moving, for me: on the back of the scrap I found an unfinished poem referencing the book from which the scrap had been taken—which was apparently a present from me (“Eddie”, back then) which I gave to him to write poems in:

     This book is a present from Eddie
     To write in its pages in verse
     So I'm holding my pen at the ready
     For thoughts, be they better or worse.

     Now Eddie like me takes to rhyming
     Though neither to fame may aspire
     Yet often the thoughts
     We burn with poetical fire.

May the poetical fire of the Spirit which inspired my dear granddad, lover of beaches and sunsets, hewer and tender and lover of trees, walker in and lover of Creation and its Creator, burn also in me, as he wrote.