Tinker’s Penny

“Non, je ne regrette rien.” - Edith Piaf

She was a delicate mountain flower
A trifling unremarkable darling
An inconsequential diminutive.
But she made my juices flow
And in them my head swam.

She was the petaled perfume
Of my one time, forever, spring.
And I loved her well -
The best I could -
In my rounder’s heyday.

She was a precious copper
In this wanderer’s pocket, dispossessed,
In my gaudy wagon, spent,
On the back roads’ secret waysides
My hammer on tin.

What was this treasure, once in my hand,
That I tossed unthinking for a pebble
And now is gone,
Lost all ways,
Beneath concentric rings?

From Mountain Wizard by Thomas J. Phalen, an Irish-American poet friend.