Draft in the author’s style. This poem was written for Poet of Wall Street to sit beside the author’s own readings, and is waiting for the author’s review. The commentary is a working draft too.
My grandfather kept a paper strip inside a wooden drawer,
A curl of ticker tape he saved from many years before.
He said it rained like confetti on the parade of the brave,
When the heroes came home marching and the city learned to wave.
And on that strip were letters of the companies he knew,
The railroads and the steel mills and the dreams that someday grew.
He bought one share of each of them with wages from the dock,
And he never read the papers, and he never watched the clock.
Now the tape is thin and yellow and the drawer is mine to keep,
And those shares have grown to orchards while he rested in his sleep.
So I keep his ticker tape dream in the pocket of my coat,
For patience was the richest word my grandfather ever wrote.
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Commentary
A grandchild finds a curl of old ticker tape and, with it, a grandfather's lesson about slow and patient saving.
The grandfather kept “a curl of ticker tape” in a drawer. It once “rained like confetti on the parade of the brave,” and it holds the names of “the railroads and the steel mills.” He “bought one share of each of them with wages from the dock.”
He “never read the papers” and “never watched the clock,” and the shares “have grown to orchards while he rested in his sleep.” The grandchild now carries the tape, because “patience was the richest word my grandfather ever wrote.”