Skip to content

The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

A New Face

Are you not beautiful enough?
Do you have scars?
Is your smile asymmetrical?
Has age fallen on your shoulders?
Did birth give you a countenance
no one wants?
Would you submit to a surgeon’s knife
to change the portrait of your face?

I have no quarrel with that.
I enjoy perfect smiles,
the winking of eyes,
the cleft of chins,
the piquant novella
of a soul on the mouth.

I change my garden
year to year.
It is my face,
a lengthening of the hedge,
the smile of a pool,
the tucking in of a bed,
freshening,
like rearranging furniture.

But a cautionary note:
using a blade,
is losing the life
you put on yourself.
The curvature of joy
from raising a child.
Sorrow softened by love,
the resolve of enduring
and patience of your lips.
The grin of your heart,
that keeps laughing and playing.

All swept away by a surgeon’s skill,
replaced with a mask,
so nothing worth having
is seen anymore.
The little things we tell in our faces,
wrinkles around eyes,
the patina of time
in our cheeks and noses.
How well or ill we have come
to the place of altering ourselves.
To hide or reveal our soul inside,
that says,
mirror, mirror on the wall,
do I own the face that looks at me?

Published inIndex of all Poems