Winning Poems: Adult Division (English Language)
First Place | Second Place | Third Place
First Place: Barbara A. Rouillard
won't forget it
"An elderly woman, a Holocaust survivor, is being treated in a Swiss hospital. She is attended by a nurse, a younger woman, who spots the bluish-green number tattooed on her arm at Auschwitz. 'Oh, how clever of you!' the nurse exclaims. 'You put your telephone number on your arm so you won't forget it.'"
- The Boston Globe , July 16, 1998
dear child,
perhaps they felt owning me
was a way of owning God.
branded, scorched, and seared
with the blue-ink seal of cattle, I was
drawn and quartered. damned, condemned.
perhaps they thought
the knitted kippah
on my husband's head
hid his horns
so they reacted
with alarm --
sending out
an invitation
to a huge global party
of chaos and flames. purity by fire --
so essential to relating to God.
how did I survive?
I held my breath
through flooded caverns -- up to tunnels -- to secret chambers --
until I was able to squeeze my nose
into an air pocket of sacred space.
others sat around
like statues
while they, who were running out of ashes,
made more and more and more...
I was blessed, help eventually came
found and saved.
no, child,
I won't forget it --
I was
a blemish, an imperfection. I was a piece of meat.
Barbara has been a teacher at West Springfield High School for the past twenty-five years. She is an award-winning writer with over eighty-five publishing credits. In 1994, she was granted an NEH Fellowship for a study of Twentieth-Century American female poets.
THE ORPHAN
"I am an orphan,"
She screams to the wind.
"What mother I had
Flew on the back of a nettle
Whip hand mad
She raced the sun
Demon mad, she strode the sky
To overtake chaste night
Bird of iron, feather eyes.
Lace of beaded ink.
Clawed neck, and kidney
Stolen from her bloodied prey."
Orphan. Nursed on
Emptiness. Weaned on
The wind. Craving
The once mother gone.
Ebony mirror
Frozen hate, bitter tears
She sighs in the wind, and sees:
"A singular face, my own."
Ellen is Professor of Theatre at Smith College, Fulbright Scholar (Costa Rica, Hong Kong), and an actor, director and writer. Her award winning plays have been seen in New England, North Carolina, California and in Bucharest, Romania. This year, her essays and poetry have been published in Our Lives: Anthology of Jewish Women's Writing, The Deronda Review, and Jewish History. Ellen also brings theatre to women in prison, adult learners, and adjudicated teens.
Third Place: Corrine De Winter
OUR LADY OF FIFTH AVENUE
And I saw another angel
I believed could understand
The deaf and dumb.
Every night beside him
I dreamed of water
And mirrors that would hold him.
I watched the bruises rise
Like highway flowers
Against the nightlong hours.
And I saw another angel
Like stars appearing
Under the rose window
Of the Fifth Avenue entrance
At St. Thomas's Cathedral.
The indigo glass like a night sky
Above the organ of 8000 pipes.
Early Winter, angels propped
On street lamps,
Trumpeting through tinsel
As if their electric light
Could bring grace to the city.
On sidewalks those of temporary shelter
Move slowly, wanting someone
Or something to worship.
They try to remember
The honey in the beehive,
How wetlands make up
The landscape of desire,
Impossible to build on.
Did it matter that holiness,
Like love, almost always meant sorrow
In the end?
That of course a sacrifice was in order?
But there, they shuffle past
Our Lady of Fifth Avenue
Now listening to the confessions
Of an addict who sleepwalks daily,
Now beside a small child
Waking from a bad dream.
And I saw another angel
Outside a mint-green halfway house.
The faces seemed to float as they smoked.
Neither fast nor slow, these men
Forever in between this world
And something further.
And I saw another angel
In the faces at the asylum,
Their bodies curled up
In the fetal position
As if to stop the hurt of time.
But already those spirits
Have risen above humanity
Like a sparrow once trapped
Who has found an opening in the eaves.
Winter evening.
The Via Dolorosa.
The hound buried by the willow tree,
The wild affair,
The voices speaking in tongues,
Everything.
Everything now silent as snow.
The barker calls like a prayer;
The Way of Sorrow, The Way of Sorrow.
Now East, those angels of sobriety,
Of drunkenness, of children
Unwhole and waiting to be saved.
Another angel I saw
In a bee out of season
Trying to move through glass.
In a blind kitten
Abandoned on the fairgrounds.
On the Bowery
The men eating the fractals
Of Love in reverse,
Laid prostrate on a torn mattress,
And, as though nature had carved
A fetish out of them,
Wings emerged.
A heartline ran from the skull
Down the spine.
And I saw another angel
Trying to talk its way out of Purgatory
Where the girls wore black pearls
And ruby slippers,
Dancing like Salome
As they advanced toward Hell.
In this Eden people shuffle past
Looking for dreams of Hollywood
Though James Dean was now only
An empty tomb in Fairmount.
Even the mimics of Dean had vanished
Along with the blonde spy and the belly dancer.
And I saw another angel
And it was Fear.
Nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, Corrine's poetry, fiction, essays and interviews have appeared worldwide in over 800 publications. She has been the recipient of awards from Triton College of Arts & Sciences, Writer's Digest, The Esme Bradberry Award, The Madeline Sadin Award, The Rhysling Award, and has been featured in Poet's Market 1995-2006. Ms. De Winter is a member of HWA (Horror Writer's Association) and is a resident of Western Massachusetts.
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