| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
LAST MINUTE CHORE
Jim Fowler
(The Versifier Online Poetry and Art Forum)
We were embarrassed by what
you wanted to do. You made us
promise, strong hands now weak,
wringing the deed out of us.
We drank, laughed self-consciously
that summer afternoon, hot as the red
peppers you considered fertilizing,
in a mad fit of immortality.
Instead, your ashes, sifted fine
to feel, were nervously placed
and stirred in two gallons of paint.
Bone white that matched no chip.
You on the shed. Two coats cover
the tears of our craziness.
Judge Aaron Welborn’s comments: “Elegies ought to be simple. (How many words can ever pay adequate tribute to a life?) Nothing fancy here. But the spartan simplicity of these fourteen lines is only their second-greatest virtue. First and foremost is their humor. As is often the case in life, the ending here comes as a surprise, with one of the funniest lines I’ve read in a while: ‘You on the shed.’ A clever homage to a man of few words, as I imagine the subject of this poem to be. What more needs to be said?”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, June 2005
