First Place Winner, March 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, March 2003

PASSENGER SIDE
Dana Elaine Carr
(Café Utne)

So much more patient with intricacy,
even than in my youth,
when I won a reputation for complicating
anything I touched,
I gather the details of every landscape,
the flakes of paint on every abandoned barn,
the sculpture of each weed that grows
in the roadside ditch,
the precise way the tear in the banner
shows the sky, sings with the wind,
fading billboards with puzzling messages
about agricultural lubricants and God,
and signs offering bulbs free
to those who will plant them in hope.

Judge Mark Yakich’s comment: “A very meditative poem, sites and sights seen from a travelling car window. The lines ease into each other in rhythmic three-beats, the easy motion of a speeding car, or the way a ball bounces ending in a sweet dribble. The diction here is of a southern pastoral and the poem closes with an observation which subtly offers a seed of hope.”