Hands
The puppet show! Remember, meine Kindlein,
our first smallholding summer, the scent
of new-mown hay, your gran and I still young
enough to shear a sheep and start a garden?
Recall the wooden clothes horse
on which we draped a sheet to make a screen
above which you moved Ms Marigold
and Morty, and extemporized their voices?
An airer in aluminum
replaces it. I’ve sawn it up for kindling.
The puppets I made remain,
scarred from ancient fights, lacking clothes
. . . and hands. All they long for
is your warm hands back inside them.
Alex Barr’s recent poetry is in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Quagmire Magazine, Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Scintilla, The Dark Horse, Orbis, BlueHouse Journal, and Hole in the Head Review. His poetry collections are Letting in the Carnival (Peterloo) and Henry’s Bridge (Starborn). He shares his views on poetry at https://alexbarr.substack.com. Puppets are the theme of his play Armor which is in the anthology Rushing Thru the Dark (Choeofpleirn Press). He lives in Wales.
“The puppets are ones I made. When my grandchildren were young, they enjoyed performing impromptu conversations (and fights!) between them. There were rabbits as well, but my elder grandson now has those for his very young children.”