Second Place Winner, February 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, February 2009 Third Place Poem of the Year, 2008 - 2009

VIRGINIA SINGS BACK TO THE STONES IN HER POCKETS *Laurie Byro* (Desert Moon Review) I must get the details right. How stones warbled to her from the garden for a fortnight or so. Troublesome, intrusive, they trilled while she weeded anemones. Beneath the ease of roots and thrust of new growth, they ingratiated themselves to her prodding callused fingers. They knew her sister was the lucky one, the one who skimmed flat-brimmed lake stones with the children. This one lay on the couch with her eyelids peeled back, mushroom capped stones rattling in the crèche of her eye sockets. Stones were faithful as vowels; they didn’t let her down. Night after night, her husband begged her to push them back into the gully of silence. Last night, she overturned another patch of fertile earth, brushing off the smooth and round. She pictures the summer table noisy with anemones and her sister’s brood. She is washed out, a little brown thrush. “Drab hen, frump” her sister will urge her to over- come the day’s exacting brushes. I must get the colors right, melt down her charms to the bare-bone mauves and ochre. The stones will do their job shortly. Aggressive reds need to be given back to the soil—to the bridegroom river. We must empty out all the flecked mica chips from her pockets, the cloth’s blood stained lullabies, the stones’ last sweet songs. Comments by judge Elena Karina Byrne: “Our second place winner, ‘Virginia Sings Back To The Stones In Her Pockets,’ reminds us of what Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz said about poetry being ultimately mythology, creating a self we can bear to live and die with. We then might also find metaphor (whose Latin origin means to carry-over), especially extended metaphor, translating experience to reenact the ‘last sweet songs’ of who we are. In this haunting poem, the odd ‘details’ blur between dream and reality, where stones are ‘faithful as vowels,’ in the mouth of the imagination.” Poem of the Year Judge Xeufei Jin’s comments: “A poem set in a painting of natural/domestic surroundings. The speaker as a painter describes the process of creating art. Stones are presented as a natural element, like soil, that connects both the living and the dead and binds them to a place. The tone of voice, charged with music and feeling, celebrates this unity.”