Written by David B. Edwards
What is it about my old shirt that makes it inscrutably self-perpetuating?
I still put on this veteran rag, now fifty years in service.
It has holes, and its neck sags, like mine. Its edges are frayed,
also like mine. The appeal that drew me to pick it has in course
wilted and faded away into nondescription. Like me. I in long habit
bear it about the house and in bed, and it has worked a war or two.
These sewn sinews once insinuated into a seasoned soldier, but
its fight has so fatigued that it no longer can come to attention.
This battleworn trooper now has to repose on its ragged own, without my
ordering which uniform pleats it must assume, as it formerly allowed.
And for my part, I would not begrudge its unrepentant desertion.
Something there is about this closet patriarch, though, that compels me to keep it,
even cherish it. Perhaps because over critical life times its fabric has
woven into mine, and I have become as comfortable with it as with
myself. It is a shirt not short of the scars of history, my own biographer
with learned entries etched by my sweated stress into its tattered tablet.
It in this protracted partnership absorbed me, the me with stormy struggles,
and has by trained frequency forsaken its own form to conform to mine.
So, what is it that endears this old shirt to me and endures?
More than all, it has become my loyal comrade with arms
that has got not just my back, but my front and my sides, covered
and refuses to retire.
DBE
Excellent wordsmith
Thanks!