First Place Winner, March 2008 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, March 2008 Honorable Mention, Poems of the Year, 2007 - 2008

CAROL FOR THE BROKENHEARTED *Brenda Levy Tate* (The Critical Poet) Can you hear the whole sky ringing? I watch you stumble under its alleluia bell. Your bare feet string a dozen prints like pearls across the December grass. These soles are your only stars, girl. Hours, days, years — every last wound you’ll ever endure — catch in the silty net you drag behind, sans mermaids, moths or seraphs' teeth. Your uncombed dreams pour down your face, white as salt. Listen, the sea is shifting in sleep. It’s Christmas, and you are unparented again. We both wait in this empty inn-yard; a few stray gods quarrel behind their curtain. Since they have been replaced, no doubt they can discount one more failed prayer, one more gloria in excelsis. A feather zags its way to earth. This is only an owl’s trick, girl. If you pick it up, you will be lost. Can’t you feel the darkness gathering itself? Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope. Tomorrow is ordinary, as you must surely expect by this time. Come into the pub-light where a solitary barman offers decent ale and music for all the bruised people. We are among them, we whose homes and lovers have blown like scarves over the world’s edge. Here’s to absent friends, someone says. I lift a mug; foam spatters my right hand. A nearby church peals one o’clock and I almost believe in something. Then I look down at the tabletop reflecting your face. Its eyes turn to knotholes, beaten into the wood. Its mouth is the crack under a door. You’ve damned me, girl, with a feather saved from dirt. Now you wear it in your hair. Judge Fleda Brown’s comments: “I could almost choose this poem for its one line, ‘we whose homes and lovers have blown like scarves over the world’s edge,’ but there is much more to like here. The poem is beautifully controlled by its four-stress lines—it is a carol, after all—but within the lines, many wonderfully strange turns. The tension of the darkness of the two people’s lives set against the ringing alleluias of the season does not include one maudlin line or image. ‘Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope.’ Metaphor is smart in this poem. This poem is smart and polished.” Poem of the Year Judge Kelly Cherry’s comments: “The use of metaphor allows a reader to make associations that would otherwise not occur.”


About the InterBoard Poetry Competition Archive of IBPC Winners 2nd Place Winner, March 2008 IBPC Poems of the Year, 2007 - 2008