Modern Man Contemplates His Image While Shaving
They say that the Victorian would glory in his beard.
You’d never catch Lord Tennyson or Charles Dickens sheared.
It seems we might intuit then a link: proclivity
For facial hair seems to allow great productivity.
For if you count the vanity a thorough shave requires,
It surely must cut time for altruism’s grand desires.
If lost in gazing at one’s jawline in a steamy glass,
Grand epics, or three-deckers, will not likely come to pass.
Susan de Sola is an American poet living in the Netherlands. She has published poems in The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, Light, American Arts Quarterly, River Styx, and many other journals. She is the co-creator, as photographer, of a chapbook, Little Blue Man, with Clive Watkins, and is a winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize.