I cried today. I fol­lowed a link for a folk musi­cian I had not heard of before, and as soon as the first few notes of a song (his voice and gui­tar) started play­ing on his web site, the tears sprang up. I could not under­stand a word this man was singing, but my reac­tion was automatic.

Music truly is the uni­ver­sal lan­guage, for I found after some look­ing around that the song (“Bapa”) was one of grief for a dead father. The artist is Geof­frey Gur­ru­mul Yunupingu. He is indige­nous Aus­tralian, of the Gumatj peo­ple. Musi­cally, he is a mem­ber of the Salt­wa­ter Band but also plays solo con­certs. He was born blind, and taught him­self to play the gui­tar. His debut album is enti­tled Gur­ru­mul.

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Lately I have been involved in a project of scan­ning old let­ters from my par­ents’ attic and other stor­age places, to add to our fam­ily his­tory knowl­edge. These con­cern my father’s fam­ily, and I have been able to find all kinds of bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion about my great-grandparents, great aunts and uncles and grandparents.

The house my par­ents live in was built by my grand­fa­ther years ago, and many other old fam­ily things are in the attic and other parts of the house. My dad has recently become inter­ested in divest­ing him­self of some of the old books and ephemera he and his father col­lected and saved over the years, and I have been pon­der­ing on the best way to do that. I’ve come up with sev­eral ideas, but in the process I have been reminded of a poem I love dearly.

Some­where in all those boxes in the garage (yes, it’s hered­i­tary) I have a typed copy of a poem called “I Love Old Things.” All I can ever remem­ber of it on my own is “I love old things, cracked, bro­ken, torn things.” It’s a beau­ti­ful poem and, if you’re a per­son inter­ested in old things, gives a won­der­ful feel­ing when read. Since I didn’t feel up to brav­ing the garage quite yet, I went look­ing for the poem online. I think it must be fad­ing out of the gen­eral con­scious­ness, which would be a real shame, because I only found a few sites with even a men­tion of it.

When I found it, the poem was every­thing I remem­bered. The poet talks of “streets of old cities crowded with ghosts” and “old books frayed from the search­ing of truth-hungry fin­gers.” Isn’t that great? And “the old sun, the old moon, the old earth’s face.” If any of these phrases sound like home to you, here’s a link to the poem (nicely illus­trated with a gar­den theme) so you can read the whole thing for yourself:

The poet’s name is Wil­son Mac­Don­ald. I found some bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion on him here.

My mis­sion now is to find a copy of a book con­tain­ing the poem so I don’t have to hunt else­where every time I want to read it!

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