Anyone who knows the old refrain "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" knows it is a lament: beautiful things melt, and we are left mourning. The title of Dave Bonta's poem borrows that line, and the poem itself then declines to mourn. A trip to the barber becomes a small, dry argument against sentimentality about time.
The opening is a refusal. "This is no / winter in which / I am snow / under the barber's hand." The speaker rejects a ready-made picture of aging: hair whitening, a head turning to snow, a life entering its winter. The line breaks make the refusal feel almost physical. The first line stops on "no," a flat denial, and only then does the sentence go on to say what it is denying. "In which" dangles at the end of line two as though the sentence were still deciding what to say. The first and third lines also rhyme, "no" with "snow." The poem seems to be listening to its own sound as it says no to snow.
The correction comes after the stanza break: "but a sack of hard time, / late and gone." This is the poem's strangest image, and it works in several directions at once. Judging by the barber's hand, the sack could be the heap of cuttings swept off the floor, or the bag that holds them. But the sack holds "time," not hair, and the metaphor turns something airy into something heavy and lumpy that can be carried and thrown out. "Hard time" has the weight of a prison sentence, and a shorn head can suggest that too, though the poem never says so. "Late and gone" is a neat double-sided phrase. "Late" can mean overdue, and it can mean dead, as in "the late So-and-so." Either way, whatever the sack contains is over. The word "gone" closes the line with a thud.
Then the mood changes. "I read a clock with pleasure / after that." Nothing dramatic happens. The speaker simply looks at a clock and enjoys it. After the sack of hard time has been set down, time is no longer something that crushes or something to grieve. It is a number on a dial, and reading it is a small pleasure. The poem seems to say that the old lament, with its mourning for what has melted away, can be swapped for a plainer, more livable relationship with the present. The phrase "after that" is deliberately offhand, almost comic. It ties this calm to something as ordinary as a haircut, as if a trim could do what philosophy often cannot.
The sound of the poem supports this. The first stanza is full of short, stressed words, and "sack of hard time" is nearly all monosyllables, with its hard k and d sounds, so that the line itself feels packed and heavy. After the rhyme of "no" and "snow," the poem abandons rhyme altogether. That is a quiet way of letting go of the earlier, more poetic mode. The closing line, "I read a clock with pleasure," moves more easily, and "pleasure" is the only word in the poem that lingers over two syllables. Then "after that" ends it flatly, with no flourish.
The poem is significant because it does so much with so little. In eight short lines it holds a literary echo, a visual metaphor, a pun, and a change of emotional weather. It also takes a subject that usually produces solemn writing, the passing of time, and treats it with humor and modesty. Its snow is neither beautiful nor tragic. It is something the barber sweeps away. What stays with the reader is the speaker's unexpected lightness, the sense that being done with a burden is less a loss than a relief, and that a clock can simply be read.