First Place Winner, April 2007 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, April 2007

WINTERSET *Bernard Henrie* (The Writer’s Block) Your dwarf Tangelo is frostbitten, rigor brittles the pulp; a re-planted Nagami kumquat lumbers in a terracotta pot. Myrtle shrivels beyond the porch and the birdbath is still iced; Spring empty handed and brown. I pull on heavy gloves and clear debris; Later, we begin a card game, we discuss a travel book but break off and then stop. Someone telephones. The aimless evening falls on the house and like widow weave folds along the chair stopping at the lamp. When did I cross an invisible line and never find my way back? A palsied old man tapping the steep stair. Judge Bryan Appleyard’s comments: “The first stanza is a showstopper. The first two lines signal at once that this writer feels poetry. I’m not sure about the one-line-short fourth stanza -- though I can see why it is lopped. This poem does much with little.”


About the InterBoard Poetry Competition Archive of IBPC Winners 2nd Place Winner, April 2007

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