The Junk Box
My father often used to say:
“My boy don’t throw a thing away:
You’ll find a use for it some day.”
So in a box he stored up things,
Bent nails, old washers, pipes and rings,
And bolts and nuts and rusty springs.
Despite each blemish and each flaw,
Some use for everything he saw;
With things material, this was law.
And often when he’d work to do,
He searched the junk box through and through
And found old stuff as good as new.
And I have often thought since then,
That father did the same with men;
He knew he’d need their help again.
It seems to me he understood
That men, as well as iron and wood,
May broken be and still be good.
Despite the vices he’d display
He never threw a man away,
But kept him for another day.
A human junk box is this earth
And into it we’re tossed at birth,
To wait the day we’ll be of worth.
Though bent and twisted, weak of will,
And full of flaws and lacking skill,
Some service each can render still.
By Edgar A. Guest
Edgar Albert ‘Eddie’ Guest was born on 20 August 1881 in Birmingham, England. He immigrated with his family to the United States of America in 1891. From his first published work in the “Detroit Free Press” until his passing in 1959, he penned some 11,000 poems that were syndicated in 300 newspapers and collected into more than twenty books. Mr. Guest is reputed to have had a new poem published in a newspaper every day for more than thirty years. He became known as ‘The People’s Poet,’ writing poems that were of a sentimental and optimistic nature. Edgar Albert ‘Eddie’ Guest passed on at 77 years of age on 5 August 1959 in Detroit, Michigan, United States of America.
My father often used to say:
“My boy don’t throw a thing away:
You’ll find a use for it some day.”
So in a box he stored up things,
Bent nails, old washers, pipes and rings,
And bolts and nuts and rusty springs.
Despite each blemish and each flaw,
Some use for everything he saw;
With things material, this was law.
And often when he’d work to do,
He searched the junk box through and through
And found old stuff as good as new.
And I have often thought since then,
That father did the same with men;
He knew he’d need their help again.
It seems to me he understood
That men, as well as iron and wood,
May broken be and still be good.
Despite the vices he’d display
He never threw a man away,
But kept him for another day.
A human junk box is this earth
And into it we’re tossed at birth,
To wait the day we’ll be of worth.
Though bent and twisted, weak of will,
And full of flaws and lacking skill,
Some service each can render still.
By Edgar A. Guest
Edgar Albert ‘Eddie’ Guest was born on 20 August 1881 in Birmingham, England. He immigrated with his family to the United States of America in 1891. From his first published work in the “Detroit Free Press” until his passing in 1959, he penned some 11,000 poems that were syndicated in 300 newspapers and collected into more than twenty books. Mr. Guest is reputed to have had a new poem published in a newspaper every day for more than thirty years. He became known as ‘The People’s Poet,’ writing poems that were of a sentimental and optimistic nature. Edgar Albert ‘Eddie’ Guest passed on at 77 years of age on 5 August 1959 in Detroit, Michigan, United States of America.