Old Things

By Pansye H. Powell

I love old things:
Weatherbeaten houses with moss-grown roofs
Where memories of generations cling;
Old china, fragile as the lily hands
That painted blossoms on it long ago;
Brasses from those dimly lighted shops
Where skullcapped ancients peddle hammered wares;
Old books where scattered margin notes
Are indices to histories never told;
Old people who have aged like ivory,
Made beautiful by Time’s poetic touch;
Old loves that, like remembered music,
Are sweeter as their memory grows old;
And pictures on whose colors Time has laid
A hand that tempers them to golden tones.

(1946)