Grandfather's Guitar

Needs Revision.

Buried beneath boxes in the back of the house

Rested his grandfather’s old oak Gibson.

When calloused fingers plucked out that sweet vibrato sound,

The big scary world went missing.

Six thin nylon strings rung one by one.

Tightening his grip on the wooden neck,

He hammered out notes in one long run,

‘Till his wrists collapsed and his fingers were wrecked.

He knew nothing of music, but this he understood:

A guitar is only as special as the men who play it.

Craftsmanship created song out of dark and dun wood,

His hands as bloodies and blistered as the ones that made it.

The fretboard ran shiny from the salty dew of his sweat.

As the strings indented his aching fingertips,

He pressed on. On the shiny finish of the wood of the fret,

Each chord hummed like the song that slipped from his lips.

Each word shook from his throat in a deep bass vibrato,

Timid and staccato, it came out more like croaking.

He sang through the evening and well into tomorrow,

In a voice like his grandfather’s after years of smoking.

But his throaty croaking wasn’t from cigars,

Or vocal wear after eighty odd years.

That man had been his family. All that’s left is a guitar.

He’d suppressed the grief until he felt the sting of tears.