First Place Winner, November 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, November 2005

Sì, ARTEMISIA
Rebecca Palapala
(Poets.org)

Sì, Artemisia,
nessuno muore dalla tristezza.

If we are very careful, we can make sadness
last all day--push eggshell fragments
against yolks with clumsy fingers,
move slowly through the metered rain
paced and gentle until well past noon.

Sip your tea and poison slowly
in a cool kitchen-tiled floors, bare feet.
Drag soft hair across lips,
turn down the radio to a dolorous hum.

Concentrate.
The sun comes to us, doesn't it?

If we do not move, and only if--

If we pick up our pens, we mustn't
say a thing, but rest the ink there,
let it seep into paper pulp ravines.
Tomorrow, maybe, it will be
a poem.

Sì, Artemisia, perché siamo ancora vivi.

If we sleep very softly, not turning,
draw the curtains against the threat
of a sunny morning hopefully--
he will be there still at first
particulate light-purring.

Judge Ravi Shankar’s comments: “By and large we live in a monolingual culture so to find a poem that uses another language, not as gratuitous ostentation, but as constitutive of meaning is a rare treat and ‘Sì, Artemisia’ does just that. That we might have enough idea about the roots of romance languages to pick up sadness (‘tristezza’), death (‘muore’) and life (‘vivi’) is sufficient to provide the scaffolding with which to build an interpretation. The specter of longing is given wispy form here, the sounds of loss inherent in the quotidian (‘radio's dolorous hum’) given precise utterance, and the poem halts (‘If we do not move, and only if--’) in the middle of its recitation to perch on the sill of possibility. Artemis is the daughter of Leto and Zeus, Apollo’s twin, and represents the hunt, fertility and the wild, and in Herodotus, Aretemisia, a female soldier, led a squadron of Greek ships in Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, and the shape of valor given by those allusions is undercut by the inevitability of certain loss. The craft of this poem, the iambs of ‘the metered rain,’ serve its purposes well.”