“When seven lang years had come and fled, / When grief was calm, and hope was dead”

For Poetry Monday, another modern sonnet:


As Is, Nicholas Friedman

Just north of town, a quaint Sargasso Sea
for bric-a-brac: the barn, itself antique,
spills over with a grab-bag panoply
of outworn stock revalued as “unique.”
Typewriters tall as headstones fill the loft
where they’ve been ricked away like sacks of grain;
a coffer yawns the must of oak—gone soft—
when one man, squinting, lifts the lid to feign
intrigue. Nearby, his wife surveys the smalls:
art deco bangles bright as harpsichords,
a glut of iron trivets, Christmas balls,
Depression glass and warping Ouija boards.
One man’s junk is another’s all the same.
They don’t buy much, but that’s not why they came.


Published in 2012, in case you're wondering, and the author's American.

---L.

Subject quote from Kilmeny, James Hogg.