Winning Poems from the Cyclamens
and Swords 2009 Poetry Contest
FIRST PRIZE - DONNA LANGEVIN
The best way to eat a snowflake
Say grace before you begin
then delicately
as a butterfly
dipping
her feet into nectar
taste your way
around
and around
the shape
of its divine pattern
to preserve
the symmetry
of that moment
it tumbled
from the infinite
on to your red mitten
When you reach
the very last hole
at the center
of its being
melt your tongue inside it
tenderly as a lover
SECOND PRIZE - ROBERTA TRACY
Scimitar Wind
I would ride the scimitar wind
O’er simmering sea and sand
Hornpiping swells and swallows
To free a captive land.
I‘d stroke its long wild tresses
As it wove me through the trees
Slashing, slicing, piercing
Fighting as it frees.
I would ride the scimitar wind
And watch the blossoms swarm
Frenzied flying victims
Of dancing death by storm.
My tears would water petals
Lying too soon on the ground
Pristine indiscretions
Swept in a shapeless mound
~ Could great beginnings still bear fruit?
~ Would tendrils sprout from barren root?
I long to know but cannot say
Our prime is past; we must away.
I would grasp the scimitar wind
Honed down by reckless flight
Gain control of blade and soul
And stow it far from sight.
Unleashing it if lies and doubts
Make troubled times appear
Slashing, slicing, piercing
Penetrating fear.
Aiming true and steady
‘Til we reach the moment when
Forgiving and forgiven
We can begin again.
THIRD PRIZE - STAN WHITE
Heart
The ball stopped inches from my hand.
Was I throwing or catching?
Vacuum stilled the wind
penciling birds in flight.
Seas stalled in their breakers.
Iron stopped rusting,
and pause caught
planets and stars standing.
There was no fanfare,
everything quietly stopped,
like the ball inches from my hand.
Was I throwing or catching?
HIGHLY COMMENDED - ELLEN S. JAFFE
Swan Lake - for Eliz, 2005
In your dreams,
you can walk,
as easy – and hard – as flying.
You had fifty-two years
standing on your own two feet
(give or take a few –
those braces on your legs when you were six,
and of course, being infant in arms).
Until these past two seasons
of forced immobility,
you were – still are –
a dancer, prancer,
glancer, take-a-chancer,
entrancer, romancer
of people and of words.
Migrating water-bird
trapped in too-sudden ice on a murky lake
in dire enchantment –
not ugly duckling waiting to transform
but free-form swan caught in suspended flight,
You will rise from your cage of steel and wheels
to music you can hear, sonorous and sweet.
For we too dream of you, walking, yes, and dancing,
always dancing. We see you
in the i-lands of our minds
imagine you flying
through brilliant white-feathered night,
darkness into light,
possibility into perception,
elegant as stars, space-spinning into place.
HIGHLY COMMENDED - CAROL FRITH
Walking Near the Wharf
It’s growing late. The streets are empty—
not a star in sight. There’s too much fog.
The river’s running black tonight.
You ask me if a season ends like this—
steam rising from the alley in a silver smoke.
The streets are empty and it’s very late.
I remind you that it’s almost winter. I think
I see man ahead of us—walking quickly.
You say the river’s running dark tonight.
I watch the man—if it is a man—disappear.
I’m learning how to practice shadows.
It’s getting late. The streets are empty,
and now you tell me that you hear a dark
bird fly and fly against some secret window
near the wharf. The river’s black tonight.
You tell me that, and I believe you. I won’t
approach the quay. You still hear wings.
It’s getting late. The streets are empty,
and the river’s running black tonight.
HIGHLY COMMENDED - ESTHER LIXENBERG BLOCH
Building a Rock Garden
In heaving this rock up the mountainside,
I have carved a new landscape
with reversed gravity.
Painfully, I carried the fragments of space
that pockmarked the bone-like mass,
then filled their voids with the plants of my dreams.
These possessed their own weight.
I am one of the smaller forces
that reshape the contours of this hill;
less violent than the earth's own troubled core
squeezing and spewing her innards;
less savage than the needle-stabs of rain
poking blade-sharp fingers into hidden places.
I am transferring time,
voluminous, fractured,
a columbarium of buried hopes.
I perspire with the effort.
The sun laughs at my impudence,
animating the sediment and soil particles,
making them quiver in the hollows,
while the strained tautness of my arms and shoulders
fights the weight of dreams.
In place, I rebury, smother again
the silent cry of unresolved fossils,
declaim my own aesthetic.
With the tesserae of time
I have formed a new pattern;
I have recycled space,
planting in small niches
a renewed garden.
HIGHLY COMMENDED - ESTHER LIXENBERG BLOCH
Jerusalem Circuit
Winter branches splay immodest limbs
against an opaque back-cloth;
exposed gray wires drawn-up like those
of static marionettes. A Jerusalem sky -
part tepid aqua, part cursive clouds disperses
domes and towers and spires
in pallid curves and dashes. I try
to read the landmark roof-tops,
from the glass eyrie
of the bus-station's coffee-shop.
The rain stitches fine silver threads
onto the stone facades, a pin-striped
urban panorama, where a few
white faces bob like Cheshire-cats,
detached from their scurrying white socks,
weaving a loose prayer-shawl
between the rain drops
and the horizontal beams of headlamps,
as they run to catch the bus.
On the other side of the glistening roof-tops
and the syncopated stacks of solar tanks,
the beggar woman folds her limbs
beneath a tree-shaped cloud,
in front of a cloud-shaped tree.
And I know I have glimpsed
how fine-tuned prayers on slim
fingers of bark
stretch up and up,
probe the sky for unmasked sockets,
then plug in to complete the circuit.
HIGHLY COMMENDED - ELLARAINE LOCKIE
Sexed on a Kona Balcony
All his lovers have fed the birds he says
This is after I've sprinkled the balcony
with pieces of pancake
Well, we can't help it
Our wombs command the role
as surely as the moon dictates the slap
of waves against lava rock below the hotel
We are hardwired to feed hunger, if not in children
then in pets, plants and wild things
I especially like the wild ones
The touch between feral and female
A scrap becoming energy that burns in both directions
The myna who is empowered to squawk and walk
the perimeter as if giving orders
Zebra doves too dumb or smart to pay attention
House sparrows hopping like wind-up toys
as they pick up pieces for babies in a nearby palm
All of them fueling to follow their own destinies
And me with the same small flame that must have
kindled Annapurna when she filled Shiva's begging bowl
It burns through my morning bath
When I come out wrapped in a towel
to find more food for the birds
A saffron finch with fluorescent head
is eating macadamia nuts
that my man chopped with his pocket knife
He calls it male bonding
The nuts are coffee-coated, sugared and salted
HIGHLY COMMENDED - MEDIHA F. SALIBA
Unfinished Love Poem
From the window he watches her
in the garden, as she moves
among rose bushes
just beginning to open their leaf-buds.
Her breath condenses in the cold air
like a tiny cloud, as she pulls her
red-woolen shawl tight over
her white nightgown.
Beyond the garden, wind-sculpted
rocks lay in smooth
silky forms, reminders
of another time.
A time when she smelled like
wind on the mesas, and no amount
of scrubbing could wash away
the wild, or dim the light in her eyes.
Now, transparent with age,
she still causes the air to flower
and the silence to sing
as she walks in measured steps.
In the corner of his window
a delicate lace spider web
pearled with dewdrops
catches the light.
And on his desk
A dragonfly casts a shadow
on smooth parchment
and his yet unfinished poem.
COMMENDED - BREINDEL LIEBA KASHER
I and Thou
Someone told me,
Cells in the body,
Change every seven years.
The ‘you’ no longer fits.
It shifts, leaving a shadow
On some corner, vague recollections
Spread across a pavement.
You step out of an old habit
With a different direction.
There’s a change in the mirror,
Someone else’s reflection,
You don’t quite get it.
When you sat down next to me,
I got no tone on the registry.
Lovers turn strangers,
Summer turns to fall,
When you’re in the heat of things,
You can’t imagine any change at all,
And there we were, side by side,
Two parallel lines in the space
Where passion died,
A slow ride down a mountain slide.
Fog so thick, we had no vision,
There was no escaping, a head on collision.
We both survived,
That’s what’s weird,
Who was the ‘you’?
And who was the ‘I’?
And who was the ‘we’
That didn’t make it……
COMMENDED - ELLEN S. JAFFE
Her Story
She was –
suddenly –
not alone
in the tilting room,
was the clock ticking, rain falling,
music playing (Beethoven) she couldn’t listen to again for years,
was the flickering knife, red-handled,
spelling its silent message beside the chalk-board
then she was
left alone – alive –
began breathing, slipped slowly
tentatively, back inside her body
rain still falling, clock still ticking,
time is a trick
later she looked at pictures,
learned he died (was killed, knifed)
-- she wasn’t sorry.
she’s written about it before, imagined variations
now she tells it again to someone who
touches her, gets through the tight, tired places –
she tells it, not to show her medals or her scars
not to frighten or seduce,
perhaps just because it’s still there:
an offering, like bread on a chipped blue plate –
not the whole truth, but not-telling feels like a lie,
each word, each touch undoing an ancient curse.
She goes out into the sunshine, empty and quiet,
she is the cat, stalking squirrels on the dry grass,
is the squirrel sprinting into the walnut tree.
She is.
COMMENDED - ROCHELLE MASS
My daughter has brought me her baby to love
I gather things to give them, foggy December
mornings with sour plum jam. By noon I give them
hills with bellies free of clouds and greens polished
by a winter sky. Pines comb their needles for this
child but her mother wants no more than to drink
coffee in my kitchen, watch me smooth the skin
of her small girl and fold her clothes.
I tell her child what she’ll find in the next rainbow
and how we’ll splash colours on rabbits and a duck
and hear my daughter listening as she finishes her
drink. I tell the child about dark birds just over
the top of the mountain and white ones that fly
our way on fine days that glow with clarity
her mother only now has found.
Wild lilies, I tell the little child are like you now,
there’s one over there beside the rock, and there’s
a mushroom at the edge that mustn’t be touched.
I tell her because she listens as her mother never did.
Listen to the lilies and learn about the wild that’s
in them, and look at the mushroom that can’t be
touched, I tell her. Listen to it all.
Watch lilies that surprise us every year in places we
did not plant. Look for freckles in the mushrooms,
but be careful, I warn the little girl child. I tell her
about strange things and just a bit about fear. But
most of all, I whisper, love your Mother. She has
come back to her mother as you have come to her,
I say, as we sit in the early dark of morning.
A bird flies: baby girl and I watch it go
hoping we’ll see it again.
My daughter has brought me her baby to love.
