Story, Value, and Becoming More Real
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The Red Leather Chair

January 20, 2025

Susan Cowger

Kindness is hard to define—though we recognize it immediately. Like truth it stands, lives on. But kindness is also alive, motioning, Come, listen! And just like that, there you are in the midst of it. Again.

The Red Leather Chair

 

“Nothing you have not given away

Will ever really be yours … “  —C.S. Lewis

 

A little girl understands without a word

a certain chair belongs to her father

even if he’s rarely home to sit in it

It takes only once being squeezed

in next to him     watching but not watching tv

for as long as the big silver bowl

of popcorn lasts     Becoming real

smells like popcorn    and leather    a cool

maroon that comes with a lap

to warm you up    It’s salty

like the pits that didn’t pop    I rub a finger

in them    tasting the tingle    Me an’  Daddy    we

don’t care about greasy fingers    What doesn’t matter

doesn’t matter to us

 

Some things never change    it’s strange

how a chair becomes a gauge for life

Even when the pillowy headrest

splits open

 

fifty years later     leather’s cracked and

worn through     piping gnawed off by the dog

who loves salt    Poor hassock’s cockeyed    one leg

gone without a word    Take a deep breath    Maybe

this is about hanging on    and this little girl still

thinks it doesn’t matter    none of it matters

it’s just a chair

 

But this is real

This is the way things go

While family loads Daddy’s Chair on a trailer

memory grows something

like lungs that yearn to speak out

Watch

she’s taking a deep breath

 

on the day it arrives

a small handmade book 

See the little girl finger

the red leather cover     a book filled

with nothing     Empty pages

placed in her hands     and that is all

 

Life given 

then given away     written off    until there is

nothing

not read and reread    recited by heart

by our children’s children



A note to the reader: In Susan Cowger’s poetry, extra spaces between words serve as the pauses that punctuation normally provides. Capital letters denote the beginning of a new sentence. 



The featured image, “Glen Eyrie Fireplace,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.



 

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