| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
IDES
Trace Estes
(The Rabbit Hole)
This morning, the sky
is Julius Caesar dressed in a policeman’s uniform
after his encounter with friend Brutus
and the rest on the Senate floor.
The maroon seepage from unnumbered
slashes and cuts purples the areas around them,
then finally cows the blue cloth with a smeared palette.
In a defiant gasp, it dawns—
he should’ve heeded the blind soothsayer’s advice,
especially after noting the mayhem spread across
the sky this morning.
Judge Frank Wilson’s comments: “I found this to be a bizarrely haunting little lyric, its central conceit — the dawn reminiscent of Caesar’s corpse — carefully worked out to take the reader back from this morning’s sky to the morning of Caesar’s fateful day and back again, as if today were a carbon copy of that long ago day in Rome. The placement — and implication — of the word ‘dawns’ serves to anchor the poem perfectly. The suggestion that what the soothsayer knew — though he could not see — was spread out across the sky for all who had eyes to see, including Caesar, is quite a nice touch, as is the phrase ‘the rest on the Senate floor.’ Alan Watts once said that a haiku is like a pebble dropped in the well of the mind. This little poem is not so little as to be a haiku, but it continues to echo in the mind long after you finish reading it.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, October 2005
