First Place Winner, December 2001 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, December 2001

RESURRECTION
Jerry Jenkins
(Poets.org)
exhumation of mass grave at Choeung Ek, Cambodia
Years of storm have receded. Violence ebbs.
A shoal of bones, heaped up in driftwood tangles,
lies with the heft and density of clubs,
in hexagons and accidental angles.
A swell of pelvis rises as a wave
stilled in its cresting. Ribs bow up, brown staves.

Fastidious birds pick through the surface tier
of knob and shank and curve. Dark scorpions,
waxy and pliant, sidle and disappear
into this wilderness of skeletons,
of knurled bone-ends porous with honeycomb,
small cells filled with detritus, blood and loam.

A child picks up an object from the dirt,
examines it, ignorant of its causes,
drops it back to the earth. It lies inert.
The ground grows human teeth, and no one pauses
to mourn these scattered anonymities.
Starlings twitter and squeak in the arid trees.

Skulls brood in their pyramid. Owlish, white,
some rest at an angle. All have eggshell cracks.
They stare into themselves, reliving the sight
of the hatchet, baseball bat, steel pickax.
Hollow fruit of the grave, they lie revealed,
stolid as geodes broken in the field.

These silent ones, exhumed from the teeming ground,
insistent, blind and dumb as the seasons' turning,
whisper of dust, and the earth's relentless round.
But they will be heard again, urgent and burning
with what they have seen. Like chattering birds they come,
full of their secrets, out of the hecatomb.

Judge Joan Houlihan's comment: “The language of the poem 'makes things new' -- images like 'a shoal of bones,' sextains that use slant rhymes such as 'ebbs/clubs,' 'scorpions/skeletons,''and 'cracks/pickax' to convey the horror of a forgotten 'hecatomb.' The poem carefully observes a scene of past slaughter, where 'the ground grows human teeth, and no one pauses / to mourn.' But the poet has paused, and so do we, the readers.”