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Flashlights

Chapter 20: BARBERRIES
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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

BARBERRIES

You say I touch the barberries
As a lover his mistress?
What a curious fancy!
One must be delicate, you know,
They have bitter thorns.
You say my hand is hurt?
Oh no, it was my breast,
It was crushed and pressed—
I mean—why yes, of course, of course—
There is a bright drop, isn’t there?
Right on my finger,
Just the color of a barberry,
But it comes from my heart.
Do you love barberries?
In the autumn
When the sun’s desire
Touches them to a glory of crimson and gold?
I love them best then.
There is something splendid about them;
They are not afraid
Of being warm and glad and bold,
They flush joyously
Like a cheek under a lover’s kiss,
They bleed cruelly
Like a dagger wound in the breast,
They flame up madly for their little hour,
Knowing they must die—
Do you love barberries?