First Place Winner, March 2002 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, March 2002

DEAR WILFRED
Dennis Greene
(Poets.org)

...80 years gone, and still they die like cattle,
their bodies buried under lounge-room floors,
their voices lost, like ours, in endless prattle,
their deaths a bland accounting, keeping scores.

We've made them warriors for the viewing day,
bit players in our thirty second wars,
a caste of extras, used, already paid,
the unseen dead, obedient to our laws.

we see their lives as short sharp stabs of light
too brief to read what's written on the walls
then flick to where some learned late night panel
explains and blames and leaves them to their plight:
their children starve until the starving palls
and we turn over to another channel.

Judge Susan Kelly-DeWitt's comment: “I felt this poem masters its form (the rhymes seem modern and uncontrived), absorbs the voice of Owen and also speaks clearly for the living.”