Second Place Winner, April 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, April 2009

THE DAY THE CATERPILLARS CAME *Steve Meador* (FreeWrights Peer Review) We lazed on the west bank of the Auglaize, till days met, fished, buzzed on warm Blatz stolen from Treat’s garage and puked foam after inhaling roll-your-own cigarettes. We believed Tecumseh, the boy, had climbed the oaks across the river and Tecumseh, the man, had commanded the canopies to silence screams from settlers slaughtered by his hand. But the Cats came, ’dozed down the old trees. Diesel fumes suffocated the excitement stoked by the “miracle stone” with its twenty-seven skips, skims and skitters over water’s glycerin surface. Centuries, sucked up through roots now exposed to a death dance of sun and air, awaited rites at a lumber mill. Columnar trunks that once supported clouds and stars would relive as flimsy veneer and spindly table legs. With nothing to prop it up, the plum-colored universe met the ground and morning blues would drop onto the east bank. We didn’t know whether to invoke the name of Jesus or a Shawnee sachem, cry out loud to the world, “Look at the sky! It is falling.” Comments by judge Duncan Mercredi: “Why? I’m not entirely sure. I suppose it’s the rhythm of the poem. It sings, it lifts, it reaches down and tugs at your soul. The beauty of a place undisturbed for centuries and to suddenly see it’s passed ripped out by the roots that leaves one to wonder why ‘the sky is falling.’”