Third Place Winner, January 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, January 2009

DINNER WITH THE GHOST OF RILKE *Laurie Byro* (Desert Moon Review) Come here, to the candlelight. I’m not afraid to look on the dead. I was confused by snakes looping around your neck, the little girl voice that you had to swallow in order to please your mother. I told you as you twirled a red flag to draw away the slathering wolves that you would never disappoint me. The crumbling bridge where we said our goodbyes all those years ago must even now contain the echoes of our voices sleeping in its seams. How many inexhaustible nights did I stay awake to answer your letters? You asked me to steal something risky, something I couldn’t take back across the street. Greedy for praise I filled my pockets with sugar. Outside the café the night becomes a snow globe. Held in your gaze, winter takes me back. Comments by judge Elena Karina Byrne: “‘Come here’ the beginning of ‘Dinner With the Ghost of Rilke’ commands. Because of the strength of diction, we follow this instruction and immediately become participatory, complicit observers. Rilke’s ‘necessary irrepressible... definitive utterance’ colors the voice that is swallowed, a presence, nevertheless, heavy as two pockets full of sugar.”