| InterBoard Poetry Competition |
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| About Poetry Forum Entries, November 2006 |
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IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Cool intimated breath of winter – late
summer’s exhalation – early morning –
crisp September drifts towards its familiar
ancient cliff – from which, as always,
it descends by increments: dawning into fall.
Seasons now no longer seem inexorable.
Odd, they used to: like vacation slides
they lived and lied within their frames –
as disparate as names on high school
absentee lists: ambiguity – the seasons
were not you. We stepped from sand to
pavement into snow and there was no
mistaking what would grow or what would
not. Leaves would fall or sprout; bathing
suits or parkas would be packed away,
hauled out. Four years ago when I was
spreading fertilizer on my mother’s side-lawn
grass – nine months of my safari through
the wilderness of the immaculate conception
of my childhood had passed – gestating
into seeing I’d revisited at fifty-one a boy
I hadn’t been since twenty-one. And now
past unimaginable dying and rebirth, I’ve
lived four years beyond the tilling of that earth –
and seasons now no longer seem so very
here or gone. I cannot buy completely into
any season’s night – or any season’s dawn.
Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett)
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A POEM IS A BIRD
A poem is a bird
that talks of the end of cages.
(Patrick Lane)
I whisper hummingbirds,
blue as ink—
fan the illusive breeze;
an instant’s nectar kiss,
whir and flit
beyond reach and grasp;
grunt jackdaw crows,
black as shadow,
stalk littered roadsides
for a recent kill,
pluck reluctant memory—
life from death;
cry mournful loons,
summon the loveless
from mirror waters—
resonate voice,
raise ghosts of hope
to merge past and present.
Let me shout steel-eyed hawks,
tear fleeing images
from these pages—
snatch a mouse from fields,
and screech my triumph
into the dawn.
D. Ouellet
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PARALLEL WORLDS
I see in the fading vestiges of light
a world crisper, cleaner, brighter than the one
I’ve known
but it occurs to me
that the worlds are the same
and this sky wrapped in a mandarin orange sunset
I’ve seen before
with my head half bowed, watching asphalt,
bemoaning my plight between drags of a Camel Light
that I fling before me, watching it roll into the gutter
and hiss out in the tarry water there
while the twilight hush rolls gossamer clouds
before me dressed in reds and yellows,
naked sky smoothed against them
and now
everything slows
and even those wisps, those strands, those remnants of day
stand out like the Brazilian sun at noon,
like the time I laughed loud and held a bottle high
winding between outdoor tables at a bar in Belo Horizonte,
and even though I cannot see to see
the blackness fades to memory and I am on the back of a motorcycle
and the dark sky is pocked with pinpricks of light
and Willie is driving too fast and a helicopter overheard flies low
and the wind whips cold and the blades whir above and I mimic them –
“Chukka chukka chukka chukka”
J.S. Lange (Runatyr)
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MORE ABOUT THE IBPC...
General information
Archive of winning poems
Most recent poems entered from About Poetry Forum
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2005
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2004
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2003
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2002
Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2001
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