| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett) AND DEEP IN SOME NIGHTS Terry Lucas (Bardone1) Mitchell Geller (EDowson)DANCING IN THE DARK
‘O rose thou art sick,’ Blake said,
predicting the dead
in a blossom, depicting decay
in inordinate life.
All life is inordinate: Tragedy
lurks in the bud, and winter
curls up in the spring.
But when darkness comes after
Sometimes you hear laughter
rise up from dead ends of the thing
that you loved. There’s a secret
enclosed in a hand that’s ungloved
by despair. A whisper can tickle
you like a soft breeze --
a tiny reminder, the gentlest nudge
that’s less tragic than tease.
All passion’s irrational,
caring too much is the way
of the heart. But the oddest
disparity! Seems that hilarity
hides in the center of loss:
whatever destroys also seems
to enjoy making sure that you toss
yourself full into chance.
That’s when you dance.
The thin hills of my youth, sandstone
bones showing through scorpion-colored skin,
pimpled with juniper and scrub oak, I walked
among silent photons crowding the present
before my first breath, the air was long
spent on ancient fires, by day it coiled
in the cool hollows of blackened cliffs,
stalked the desert by night, rattling
in the yucca, howling in the throat
of the coyote, the distance of a winter coat
in July. From this beach,
some days the umber mounds rise,
fur ruffling in the sea breeze,
eclipsing the robin’s-egg sky,
and deep in some nights, your breasts--
RONDEAU
The virus came in ’eighty-one
As if to spoil all our fun
And render beauty skeletal,
Narcissus trapped in Buchenwald.
Jeunesse dorée now gaunt and dun.
From Provincetown to Washington
A toxic fog obscured the sun,
An iron-spiked and daunting wall --
The virus came.
Unchiseled marble by the ton,
Unwritten plays that never run.
We froze at first, distraught, appalled
At judgments that afflict and scald.
But out of grief came warmth that shone
Despite the loss since, sparing none,
The virus came.
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