Mrs. Patterson Wrote the Foreword

Lyrics

It’s three in the afternoon.
The light is pale gold on the oak desk.
Her parlor smells of lavender and old paper.
She pulls her shawl a little tighter.
The draft from the window is cool.

In her hands, the children’s book.
Rough brown leather, bound with glue and hope.
'A Lapidary Glossary,' it says on the cover.
In Bouba’s round script, and Kiki’s sharp one.
She opens it. The pages rustle.
She reads a word, then another.
Her face shows nothing at all.

She dips the quill in the indigo well.
The scratch on the paper is the only sound.
She writes.
The words are old.
The children are good.
The dictionary keeps both.

Her fingers are stiff today.
A little arthritis in the knuckle.
But the pen is steady.
She remembers them at her door.
Faces smudged with graphite and questions.
Not with filth. Never with filth.
Just curiosity, bright as a new stone.
They wanted to know where things came from.

She dips the quill in the indigo well.
The scratch on the paper is the only sound.
She writes.
The words are old.
The children are good.
The dictionary keeps both.

In her own book, her memory book,
she keeps a primrose they picked for her last spring.
Pressed between a page from 1924
and a list of hymns for Easter.
A small, perfect thing.
You find a place for the things that matter.
You make them safe.

She sets the quill down.
The single paragraph dries.
She closes their book.
The foreword is written.
It is all that needed to be said.
Outside, the day ends.