Rust

"You need a new wheelbarrow," my neighbor remarks

watching me trundle my shallow, rusting

cart to the curb, orphaned limbs and sticks

protruding like morning hair fresh

from an unmade bed.  "I've a better one

that a friend brought for our yard sale."

I'm not impressed.  He doesn't know that when

I lift the handles, the weight shifts

from my hands to those of my father sleeping

beneath the debris of a Missouri winter.

He doesn't know that this handcart

carries the fragments of my mind, the tributes

housed in the rubbish of winters turned

to spring, similes and metaphors waiting

the right poem, fractured lines

of hyperbole and hope, alliterative alleys

of childhood discards.  How could he see

beyond rust, the sonnet reclaimed?