Third Place Winner, February 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, February 2003

DIVINE WIND
Paul Madden
(Enter the Muse)

her arms, she said, were wire
the dress hanging from her would dry
if only I wasn’t rain

it was I
who stuck my finger into the sky

and replied, I was a paper bird
that rain would pull down from the sky
if only she wasn’t the wind

Judge Mark Yakich’s comment: “Like the first two, ‘Divine Wind’ involves dream though less explicitly. Or rather, this poem is more folktale-like in its stacked images of the body and the elements around it. The poem reminds me of an African folktale I once heard about how the sky used to be closer to the earth, but once all the people started using the sky as a napkin the sky rose up and out of reach. The reversal in the poem, of the ‘she’ and ‘I’ characters also creates a tone of folktaleness or mysticism, something beyond the everyday, something beyond that which can be explained by or explained away with, say, science. This poem, like all good ones, favors the divine.”