| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
STARS IN THE SEA
Harvey Novack
(About Poetry Forum!)
Sweeping low over the winking guns of the fleets,
Torpedo to strike, pounce a trigger,
Out of the sun the Mitsubishis,
Hit, shatter, hit, shatter,
This is no Tyrone Power huge in movie gloom,
This is some college kid burning to death, plunging toward the Pacific,
A kitchen-calendar Jesus fades in and out, in and out, as the blue
becomes huge.
Judge Harvey Stanbrough's comment: “The poet who wrote 'Stars in the Sea' either knows or senses that longer poetic lines convey emotion and that shorter ones evoke drama. I was especially impressed with the final six lines of this poem. In line 5, 'no' might be a typo that was intended to be 'not.' [Editor's note: I'd guess this is not the case -- the internal rhyme in 'no Tyrone Power' seems intentional to me. Care to respond, Yankeedog?] The only weak line in the poem is line 8, rendered so by the poet's decision to use 'and' as the final word of the line. [Another editor's note: I think this reading is the result of incorrect line breaks in transmitting the poem to the judge. I believe the line breaks shown above are the poet's intention.] However, this is a tiny weakness in an otherwise overpowering poem.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, May 2001
