Ben And Emma, Ancestor Guides Poem by Egbert Simcox

Children of peasant pioneers
Hardened by wilderness and want,
Their youth in wagons or atop mules,
Called after eighty, they rode to their graves in automobiles.
Mute witnesses to mindless, spasmic conflicts,
Born into a clash of brothers, died amid a war of nations.
Shared earth with Emancipator, Kaiser, Tsar and Fuehrer.
Innocent of the pestilence of tube and web,
The surfeiting torrent of vanities that now impoverish us.

They feasted on riches of innocence and grace.
Knew the glory of silence, air unenvenomed,
Unplatted wooded hills and luminous streams.
Time spared them the vision of a wounded earth,
Endless four-laned ribbons of rage and toxins
And the instrusive wail of machine-borne pagan mirth.
Not opulence Yahweh gave them,
But his slow seignorial time,
As now He weeps to see us crowd fevered minutes
With deafening, evanescent things
And crumbling monuments to the spurious.

Theirs were the ultimate riches:
Hours to love, to know and be known,
To embroider tales with talk-drenched kin and friends,
To pray, and to be channels of abundant life,
And to boast the joy of all gifts hidden in simplicity.
Ben and Emma, bonded by heaven to pair forever,
Immune by faith to the madness of change,
Lived to see their beloved through wars, triumphs and want,
Their dimming years as rays of loving constancy
When nothing else availed.
God's privileged lovers, they gloried in time together
Amid the sad music of the quiet, crystalline river
That languidly disolves the past and is slowly reborn
As the engulfing swirl of modernity that changes all forever.
Ben and Emma, parents of my parents,
Be our guidestars to serene, authentic lives
Amid our riches that cloy us,
Amid this tumult we dare not pause to understand.