Icon, by Jeffrey Johnson

St. Nicholas, artist not known (Russia) 1650. Russian Icon Museum, Clinton, Massachusetts.

 
Icon

It’s your birthday,
you solid-as-a-rock star;
enjoy it out there,
nowhere without end.
 
You may have noticed
our decline on YouTube
and TikTok where every
screenshot begs to be
 
a forever sight, every video
plays to go viral like
the shepherd you heard of
who found his sheep safe
 
and asleep, or the woman
who turned her house
inside out to find a lost coin.
 
We search for heroes
in wild-goose chases
through podcasts and blogs,
 
hoping to land on
an essential face, like yours,
a face held in place firmly
within a frame wide enough
 
to keep meaning from
spilling out, deep enough
to hold hope in reserve,
out of sight, below shoulders
 
square and motionless
in ancestral stillness,
eyes pillowed in peace,
oblivious to the wages of sin.
 
Jeffrey Johnson
 
Jeffrey Johnson: "The Russian Icon Museum in Clinton, Massachusetts is not far from my town. It's a gem of a museum. My new book of poems will be published this year by Fernwood Press."