Philip Kobylarz, Nap of Shame, Photograph
Noel
Green tea, oranges, and peppermint,
red-and-white striped paper,
cinnamon-scented wreaths
and cloying pine boughs mask your discomfit.
You creep, in the background,
a voyeur, an outsider, an intruder;
you complain, your mouth filled with nuts,
that it is all too much.
You dodge, you prevaricate, you duck
to avoid handshakes and carols
and sugared-up nieces and nephews.
The humiliation rises in my face—
at first, a faint blush, but soon,
dark enough to reveal all my secrets.
____________
Sarah Daly
Review by Jared Pearce
I like how this poem takes a familiar situation and distorts it so that I take a renewed look at the situation, both as the dodger and as the embarrassed.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Poetic of the outcasts, out of place, foreigners in our own town, adrift in our own home, strangers in our own skin and saddled with a palpable sense of inadequacy – like guilt. Like an omniscient floodlight on the darkest corners of our minds, the upcoming festivity underlines all our wrongdoings and secrets; the manifest results are unsettledness, irritability and withdrawal from what should be the most joyful celebration of the religious and consumerist calendar. If I was to read this poem with the glasses of the Catholic tradition, I’d say it depicts the time just before Reconciliation, when the burning burden of bad choices and internal turmoil is about to be lifted and dissolved by the imminent reunion with Father. I come sick to the doctor of life, unclean to the fountain of mercy, blind to the radiance of eternal light, and poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Lord, in your great generosity, heal my sickness, wash away my defilement, enlighten my blindness, enrich my poverty, and clothe my nakedness. (from San Tommaso d’Aquino, Prayer before Communion.)