Inside the shower’s stream the morning blurs,
ceremony wakes on white marble tile;
brushed steel and shaving brush wait, rituals
that ask the rushing mind to pause a while.
The bowl presents the soap, the steam the heat;
damp badger bristles swirl, patient and slow.
No canned foam, no gelled and fleeting cheat,
hands repeating what older barbers know.
The lather builds like weather in the hand,
a cloud coaxed up from water, soap, and time;
slow turns that ask a man to pause and stand
at break of day before its clamors chime.
Hands learned the quiet patience of the bowl,
small weather turning slowly in the soul.
*****
Keith Roberts writes: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t give my wife credit for this poem. For my birthday she gave me a bowl, a brush, and a puck of all-natural shave soap from a local artisan. A little whisk into lather, the woody-whiskey scent comes up, and suddenly I swear I can hear modal jazz somewhere in the background. In a world built around consumption, algorithms, and binary takes, it’s important to our humanity to rediscover the transcendent in small, ordinary experiences like this. And maybe more importantly, to listen when other people share theirs. This poem is a thank you to my wife for helping me find one.
“I’m just starting this writing and poetry journey. I’m a recovering math major with graduate degrees in Computer Science and Computational Social Science. Most of my career was spent living in the abstract: programming, modeling, data, systems. When my dad passed away a couple of years ago, something in me shifted. I started writing partly as a way to process the loss and partly to leave my kids something more durable than an Instagram feed. Also, and this is important, it gives me great comfort knowing that dad jokes can, in fact, achieve a kind of immortality…even in sonnet form. If that garners a few more eye rolls from my kids after I’m gone, I’ll consider my work a success.”
‘Lather’ was first published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily
Photo: “Lather” by RLHyde is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Form in Formless Times 
A delightful sonnet! As an obsessive sonneteer (one of the best things about the form being that you know when you’ve finished it) I particularly enjoy using it to convey simple, contained processes, thereby investing these with a certain metaphysical significance. Thinking about your sonnet, I found myself moved to discuss that process itself, which resulted in this:
A sonnet is an admirable form to fit a process in, let it unfold, premonitory, like a gathering storm, revealing those first signs, which do not hold an overt threat but gradually reveal their implications, and their full extent: a catalogue in single leaves which peel away from one another but are meant to link and form a unit, a cascade of information, endless waterfall of private actions publicly displayed, a list of conquests by some randy fellow, kept by, named for, his servant, Leporello…
[I can also see some ways to make your sonnet smoother, without in any way changing its sense, if you’re interested… ]
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There is, of course, a missing line in sonnet I wrote above (which is, inevitably, printed as prose).
hear-all, say-all, know-all, kiss-and-tell-all,
You can tell where it’s meant to go by the rhyme!
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