InterBoard Poetry Competition

OVER TALMADGE BRIDGE
      Catherine Rogers
      (Poets.org)

Clutch the wheel. Resist the urge to fly
into the river--it’s not your own;
it comes from the same voice
that riles the whitecaps up.
Pity the stalled gulls that make
no headway in their argument with wind;
but keep to your cross purpose,
the airy road whose white steel wings
are folded over you. Don’t look
across the guard rail at the city lights,
the ships lumbering upriver,
still less the darkened marsh
at the edge of the sea. All these
you may come to in time. Tonight,
follow the line that rises for you;
don’t think how deep the air above
and below, don’t listen when it shouts
in your left ear. When you reach
the Carolina side, you can breathe again
as you pass that stand of tall palmettos
nodding their feathery heads
like fools in the wind.