Third Place Winner, August 2002 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, August 2002

IMPOSSIBLE GRACE
T.E. Ballard
(Wild Poetry Forum)

My neighbors are having a funeral,
firecrackers pop and boom. Laughter
reaches my window licks the frame.
It is strange to realize fire is pain.
Natives celebrate life with loss
and I think of the baby,
her tiny body thrown from a car like paper;
a bird of print floating down
to the road left behind.

She is fire, soft hiss of a match,
she is the tiny puppy on the grass,
the one bought for a sister who was driving
but who now sits, her hands reaching out
for wet puppy fur, tiny yelps of need.
I have heard of this before
buying life for someone who wants death,
pulling them back to earth.

A mother is in some hospital bed,
close to here, if she has a window, bends her neck
she will see light. My children are rope, two knots
that hold me down when nothing is left,
no choice but to swallow, continue on.
The mother and I are the same
and yet we’re not, she has entered a world
which haunts my sleep in shouts and dreams--
she is beyond loss.

People offer her strings of possibility,
she is young, they speak of stories
of women who grow from fire like trees
and I know this is what she fears. Life
without rope, and how
shadows and shapes are more real
than a daughter wrapped in tar,
a tiny figure of Grace flying away.