Only Child

You were an only child, weren’t you?
The look on the face,
The tone of voice,
Assumption, condescension, accusation:
That you are wrapped up in yourself,
That you lurk on the edges of greed:
A minority group
Without advocates to lobby
For our interests.
Don’t tell me what I missed
Having no siblings,
What I never learned to do.
There were advantages:
We never lacked for books to read,
And when the time came
To attend to the frail and failing,
Lay them to rest,
We did it by ourselves.

Iconography

I spent the morning
Trying to restore the Zoom icon
To the home screen on my phone,
Not an unlikely way
For an 82-year-old to pass his time.
The grandchildren are some help
And know to resist eye-rolling.
We got a Facebook account
So we could watch the church service
Online.
We did not add pictures or information.
We have not listed friends
And do not know
If anyone has listed us.
Someone I think I might have known
In Kiwanis
Keeps wanting to add me to his
LinkedIn list.
We rely on Zoom in this strange time.
People carry on about it
But it suits me fine.
I thought I had restored the icon
To the home screen.
That’s not quite true,
But I can get to it now
With only one extra click.

Downsizing

Favourite authors dropped off
For the church book sale,
The passing of a friend.
Easier to part with:
Those memos to the file,
Notes on events
Of interest to lawyers.
We did not succeed:
A storage shed, tight
With boxes, whose labels
Have lost meaning;
Somewhere in there
Green Depression Glass
That did not sell on eBay,
The Chelsea we bought for Caroline.

Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.

You can find more of Bob’s poems here on Ink Pantry.