Notes About The Poem
4/2/2026 for Stars Or Home Poetry Contest sponsored by Ink Empress
Cottage Street Home
I'm a forgotten home!
Don't say so, it's not true.
I have not forgotten you.
Haven't you heard?
Sentiment has been abolished -
I've long since been demolished.
The place I stood on Cottage Street
is now a park where children meet
to play.
All the better!
Those children's voices
echo what my heart rejoices -
the Caswells of Huntington Park
who created light where there was dark -
the happiness, the joy, the spark.
Laura Caswell, the maid, and her child were spurned,
marriage, annulled, by rich family (burned),
then met a carriage driver -
hadn't much money, but wouldn't deprive her
of love.
Soon, six more children were born.
They left New York for California one early morn
and built you -
the house on Cottage Street.
A photo from nineteen-sixteen depicts
Oscar, Laura, Gramps, and children, six.
The oldest, 11-year-old Gramma, with her bow
and smile -
pure sunshine, all aglow.
Grammy grew up and lived next door
in the small house they built from roof to floor
where she would have a son.
It's there, amidst the wild fun,
my dad's grandparents, and each uncle and aunt,
would he, an idyllic boyhood, grant.
In my own childhood, my father was the one
to shine on me, that same ray of sun.
So, Cottage Street house, as long as I'm alive, it's true,
there's one old man who has not forgotten you.
...and so, a home, long since uprooted,
it's beams and rafters reconstituted
inside a geezer's heart,
where a voice jarred him with a start,
and said...
When your time comes, by and by,
this home awaits you in the sky.
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