| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
| Second Place Winner, June 2007 | |
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THE DAUGHTER OF ANTIOCHUS Adam Elgar (Writer’s Block) I am no viper, yet I feed on mother’s flesh that did me breed. (Pericles, Prince of Tyre I i 65-6) No point dividing day from night since both are empty. I decline on sofas and chaises- longues, hollow with age and boredom like a skin shedding its snake. These days I’m harmless, and my memory crusts over like my sight. But he’s still sharp, his nose too long, his accent crude, his stink of the sea. The only one I really wanted. He saw me as I was, as Daddy made me, as Daddy had been making me for years. I heard someone name ‘Tyre’ the other day. There were drums and fanfares, so I wondered, was it him? Had he escaped my father’s rage and come in his nineties to visit me and gloat with some ex-beauty tottering on his arm? I must have wished it. A relief from other thoughts. Even to the most, let’s say, adoring fathers daughters lose their glow, and since I had a sister Daddy farmed me out once she had reached the age he liked. Some ‘farm’ -- this dusty nowhere, a decrepit king who couldn’t till my bed. Which satisfied Daddy. What was my fertility to him? The story goes that I was burned up too when fire bombed from the sky to punish him. The woman sitting by his side, like him reduced to charcoal, was my sister. Daddy taught me flesh is foul. Correction. Showed. Correction. All the space there might have been in me for love, hunger, or tenderness was filled with him. Poisons are subtle here, blades fine, plagues frequent. I forget which nephew’s nephew grabbed the throne last time the music stopped. Judge Bryan Appleyard’s comments: “This is a dramatic monologue, a difficult form that requires restraint -- otherwise the tone of voice and the character collapses. Here the tone is well preserved and we get a real sense of the woman’s bitterness and disappointment. There are several wonderful effects -- ‘like a skin / shedding its snake’ and I like the ‘ex-beauty tottering on his arm.’” 
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