| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
THEN THE SNOW Unjay (Andrzej Markiewicz) ARIZONA MUSE J.S. Lange (Runatyr) TODAY I MAKE POLENTA Vickie Farquhar (MidusTouch)
Autumn leaves
Like you
Scarlet
Brands and scars my heart
In the wood between the worlds
Time holds its breath
Your words fell into silence
A stone into still water
The small tsunami
Of a single life
Earth folds her hands
Then the snow
I was an angel with a golem’s smile
before I woke up to my reservation;
I wore the quiet of the sky like silk
before my fallen soul met degradation.
Within the choir there was never loss,
within the reservation now, no gain.
Within the smoke of sage we loose vain hopes
of buffalo and wide stampeding plains.
The clouds are now a civilized grey shroud
where once my seraph eyes saw boundless blue.
I was an angel with a golem’s charge;
I’m now a fly trapped in the devil's glue.
Our dances brought too many rains at once
and now we slake the drought with coke and gin.
But I recall the drone of endless harps
and now prefer the raindrops on my skin.
Is hell a place where salty rivers run,
and heaven just a sky of silent truth?
As harpsichords play on to earless stone,
I spot the seams of someone's artless ruse.
Today I make Polenta –
think of the stones that ground the corn.
Corn and stones both Earth born gifts
Stone is a friend of whom we rarely think.
We use it in our homes, use it for our homes
mark the graves of loved ones –
names engraved for perpetuity.
Polenta cools on my marble slab
and when I work it
I use my mother’s wooden rolling-pin,
polished with the use of many years.
Wood, stone and I,
retain memories within each line.
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