Saying It Plain
Not camouflaged by the foliage of because,
not homogenized with white lies
or sweetened on the tongue
with a syrup of euphemism, unrecognized
as the whole truth untold,
but laid hard and sharp as a broken bolt,
without guilt or guile or guidance,
on the open palm of silence.
In Memory of Tony Stevens
I am sitting alone, cocooned in fake maple,
a cubicle hewn from library silence,
back of the stacks at the cinder block
wall hung with portraits of history’s giants,
baroque in their 19th century frames.
Beside me the start of genealogy squats
on the bottom-most shelf in orderly file.
I am here to tease some significance
from dolor and dust and the bloodless flood
of fluorescent light pouring down from above,
to lead it into the gleam
streaming from his etched brass plaque
which remembers him now, whoever he was,
who remembered me, as I bend to work,
at the desk he left for those of us he loved.
Kevin Burris is the author of Inside the Clock (Pine Row Press, 2023). His work has appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.