To the Editor:
I would like to submit the following poem in honor of Grandparents Day, which was instituted in 1978 and is celebrated the first Sunday after Labor Day. Ironically, it will fall on Sept.11 this year.
I’m sure that most of us have many fond memories of our grandparents. My own grandparents had such a profound influence on my life – I miss them to this day. I have heard my husband speak so many times of his grandfather Hines, his role model, whom he deeply loved and respected. It has been said that a grandfather has “silver in his hair and gold in his heart.”
This is also a loving tribute to the many citizens “in their golden years” that we have been so blessed to have living among us here in Polk County. Their tireless efforts and their wisdom and knowledge that they have so willingly passed on to others have not gone unnoticed.
Please enjoy “The Bridge Builder” by Will Allen Dromgoole.

An old man, going a lone highway,
Came at the evening, cold and gray,
To chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide—
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pit-fall be,
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
– Tina Melton, Columbus