SIMILE ARIA

by Sam Barbee

                                 

Nothing at stake this Christmas morning. 

The grate glares cold ash. I sip coffee

and recall family visits and apparitions

demanding reprise. Holiday lights

warm cedar branches with efforts to stay jolly. 

 

Outside, snowflakes soothe, fresh confection

masterpiece balanced beyond our threshold. 

Chill peals across the snow. Narrow drifts

shiver from the boughs. Yard gnomes grin.

Birdbath idles, basin propped against the pedestal.

 

Our tiny saints sing rounds of Jingle Bells

and toss snowballs. My son slings boyhood

My daughter casts off little sister caution—

Sublime wintering, no need for Merry New Year. 

Icicles hang from soffits, false prisms for icy shadows. 

 

I sort glossy holiday cards. 2021 slumps by the day.

Silence graphs this past year, this dreadful year,

when smallness thrived. My holiday paunch

swollen by a year I etched as edible—

my holiday efforts to burnish shiny days

 

and belittle others until we shutter failings.

I petition for the New Year's messiah with strategies

to charm next year's calendar, already highlighted

with celebrations and pursuits. The moon wanes,

shudders with a gut punch.  Shall I toss the diary?

 

Put the fresh word-a-day calendar in a drawer?

Will I placate the next world with old tricks?

Or tease tonight's marrow. I dream of easy

installments: a bit strapped for cash, my angels

flap their wings and cheer my unraveling day.

 

I stir the hearth ashes. And imagine a single

perfect morning when carols dance in the chimney

and risk sleeps in. Admire art gifted to one another,

hung on stark walls like flawless bliss trying to take hold.

Merriness found in a new masterpiece revealing old joy. 

Sam Barbee has a new collection, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag).  His poems recently appeared in Poetry South, Literary Yard.  His collection That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53) was nominated for Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best 2016 poetry collections; a two-time Pushcart nominee. 

THE SAME RULES APPLY

by Sam Barbee





Ruddy scar protracts the kept
thatch. Rusty shovels propped
as the backhoe heaves beside
the Common Grave: so many
paupers, so many people.

Pine box as caress, no time
for a tight-lipped benediction.
Spray of silt for mantles of boroughs,
and heights and neighborhoods.
No time for individual petitions.

No last kiss, or cross. Veterans
without flags or rifles on this
drab afternoon of a drab dawn.
Trees along the river, quiet field
where pigeons do not bother.

Death’s centrifugal angst plotted
within the City’s adaptable aura.
Time to seal today’s thawing dead.
The diesel throttles up. PPE-clad
laborers, leather palms tight.

Topsoil chokes off creeds, and
rings and rosaries, worry beads.
Distant tugboats sail the Hudson.
Gulls spiral behind their churning
murk, below pinwheels of gray clouds.

Sam Barbee’s poems have appeared Poetry South, The NC Literary Review, Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology VII: North Carolina.  His second poetry collection That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53) was a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016.