Holland, Clad in Winter & Asia
By Sara Barnett
Holland, Clad in Winter
Can I peel your petals please.
Your soft pinks away from greens
And use them, as once we did in city,
To soft and pulp our beds?
May I take a knife, so small, it cups unto the palm of a child’s yearning hand
And cut, from milky pod
The silk that lands for the hair shirt I still weave and weft?
Can I compare thee?
No, you are but warped sentiment in this fool grown.
I miss how light caught in the hazel of your fibrous mane, though not
The black of wild pupils, dilating, when you’d fall into disrepair, that
snowed in closed and avenuing stare, onto a bathroom floor and locked the door and
could not see you. Help you.
Oh tulip from Texas storm, please let us in.
I still dream of you in colored ribbons:
Peach and ivory.
Once, you showed us all the how of pleasure, white
tiles underneath in swim
Perhaps that’s all hotel -
some suspended tidal pool I’ve been, smashed against hard rock and
Drowning in rough wooly clothes.
In
Clusters come the cherries on fragile stem.
It is forgotten, heavy headed, lamb soaked spring.
The city lights, the moon ore our Atlantic, caught and catches you in brambled glimpse
bare against the sky
Must be, for now, enough.
Asia
When you came to me your skin was
barren,
white,
covered with smooth snow.
I recovered it with little mountains,
Breathing again. You pitched your tent in mine, and thereby
Lit a lantern moon.
Captivated, by shadowed puppet hands, was I,
along the pallet of our nights.
I would have claimed a constellation in both our names. Or
Called it
Eien Ni,
Navsegda
Yongshi in Chinese
The after:
Nothing, back to flat
through Siberian winter panes.
Fallen on my knees.
Alone,
Chagrined, and
Silent, came stop of planes.
Muted propellers, disease, the
Choke ennui again.
I wish the best for both of us now that spring is here.
It took me all this time to know true breadth of that fool year.
Sara Barnett’s fiction and poetry can be read in the following literary magazines: Arsenic Lobster, The Ginger Collect, The Hungry Chimera, Harbinger Asylum and many many more. Abroad, her pieces “O, Phylira!” and “Lay Loosestrife” appear, respectively, in the UK’s Anima Poetry and Here Comes Everyone. Feel free to check her out further online at IMDb.com and Audible.com.