Second Place Winner, May 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, May 2009

THE MARSH AT DUSK *Steve Meador* (FreeWrights Peer Review) I enter the marsh with a rabbit’s foot, a four leaf clover and knowledge that evening arrives from the west. When the sun rests on the tallest reeds I turn and carry it on my back. My senses, stropped by adrenaline, will lead me to the fleece of safety. I taste thunder before it coagulates, smell rain as it gathers in clouds. A moccasin’s yawn rivals the bellow of a fire-breathing bull. Gurgling, from a gator’s nostrils, magnifies through valleys of cattail stems, reaches my ears as harpie screams. If scraping happens along tectonic plates, I will feel it. Every splash and swish of the paddle whips up a tornadic whirlpool. Dusk evaporates. Fear bubbles like magma, hardens in my kayak’s wake. Once the plane to open water is broken I turn the bow toward the sulfurous throat that wants to swallow me and laugh, like an Argonaut come home. Comments by judge Duncan Mercredi: “Coming from a small northern village before the advent of modern conveniences, a line such as ‘when the sun rests on the tallest reeds, I turn and carry it on my back’ resonates within me and I remember walking in the reeds as a child seeing only the sun and sky above me. This work stirs those feelings and I travel back to those innocent times and that magnificent gift we’ve been given, imagination.”