| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
LILIES AND HEADSTONES
Pris Campbell
(MiPo)
Mother climbs from her grave nightly,
the moon sliding, bone white, along that
fragile passage from day’s end to beginning.
She re-arranges plastic flowers, talks
to other coffin-freed friends, polishes
the naked cross that guards the faithful dead.
Lilies once bordered the shrubs
surrounding our house like a moat.
White ones. Yellow ones. Striated ones.
Soft scented sentinels poking their heads
up through the warm soil each Spring.
My mother’s pride.
Fake carnations grace her headstone now.
Stiff, like the bodies lined in neat rows
beneath her; cold like her own body
which will never again climb into a warm bed
or scatter the crows that yet steal
from our abandoned cherry tree.
They suck the fruit cheerfully, despite
old clattering pans and one rotten scarecrow
with eyes picked as empty as the spaces
where lilies once danced with the wind.
Judge David Hernandez’s comments: “How could one read the first line of this poem and not want to read the next? ‘Lilies and Headstones’ had me from the beginning, and took me places I never expected. The poem could’ve easily slipped into sentimentality, the poet telling us how they feel instead of showing us that marvelous scarecrow at the end, eyes picked empty.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, January 2005
