Honking on New Year’s Day
The mist obscures the lake,
but allows the lights from Massachusetts Avenue
to glow and make visible the dots of the speeding cars.
The notoriously rude Bostonian drivers,
who always honk, are inaudible now,
unlike the hundred loud complaining geese
above me, hidden by the gray skies.
The canopy seems lower,
bearing the burden of the birds.
No, not a canopy,
but a gray New Year piñata
that bursts apart to allow them passage
to descend and appear.
Instead of spilling candy,
the sky swirls the milky mist.
The geese break their famous V-formation.
In disorderly rows,
they continue their urgent strident honking.
All is forgiven
as they display their magnificence in numbers.
.
Shimmery Nature
The swamp is married to the trees,
whose trunks wear icy rings
sparkling in the twilight.
Their bond will thicken and thin
and thicken and thin
before the bands turn brittle and crack.
The branches brush against the sky,
embedding tiny silver discs
that will shine for just the night.
The fog rolls in to erase everything,
as if the memory of the wedding is a burden,
but it always loses, a charming loser
in bold white.
Puffed with ego, the clouds
scuttle and fertilize earth
with their priceless liquid
that will evaporate
and replace the sky-dwellers after they vanish.
© Tara Menon
Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her most recent poems have been published in The Tiger Moth Review, Blue Minaret, American Writers Review, Don’t Die Press, Infection House, and Emrys Online Journal. Menon’s latest fiction has appeared in Litro, The Bookends Review, Rio Grande Review, and The Evening Street Review. She is also a book reviewer and essayist whose pieces have appeared in many journals.
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