Rhina P. Espaillat

Confession

My hair is thinning. More, each day,
cleaves to the brush, forsakes the head,
its lush, dark handfuls now, instead,
meager and gray.

A very minor grief, it’s true,
when plague and famine, death and war
bereave so many of much more.
Yet, grieve I do.

Holding the mirror to my crown,
observing how the landscape’s changing
compels some artful rearranging—
it gets me down,

though I’m ashamed to be caught weeping
over such paltry stuff as curls—
as if the crowns we wear as girls
were meant for keeping.

O, Paradiso

Old platters that we sang to long ago--
seventy-eights in faded sleeves--are stacked
awaiting resurrection through the slow
transfer onto CDs. Though warped and cracked,
though scratchy, they evoke--even unheard--
decades inscribed in vinyl as in rhyme.
In one, the Andrew Sisters give their word
to be with us in apple blossom time;
here, Nat King Cole spills his brown silky grief,
that stardust memory of love gone by;
here, in the light of flares, the soldier's sheaf
of mail from the home front; and here, the cry
Caruso turns to song, long stilled by then:
O, Paradiso will not come again.