Brodine / Brodinski Contest
Winning Poems 2007
1st place
David Prodell
Northern Harrier
Steaming off a 20 oz. coffee in the vineyard,
hand pruners at rest, I lean back to share
a post with a long-handled shovel. Grape canes
elbow out along the trellis wires, the sinewy arms
of farmers draped on fence rails watching
cornfields whitecap with tassels. A half-eaten
rabbit’s talon-stapled to an end post, handy work
of the resident red-tailed hawk mapping
rodent byways. Or maybe it’s a “Vacancy” sign
from the northern harrier I’ve seen skimming
the fallow pasture next door. Unlike other hawks,
the harrier’s hearing is keener, its owl-like face
a disk of stiff feathers amplifying and flagging
locations of sounds – a corn kernel pinging
down a vole’s throat, roadkill breakfast clatter
of three crows, the creek’s mud-bubbling
mumble, or this warm October sun patiently
knitting from skeins of the seen and unseen, heard
and unheard, the pattern of this day, its needles
ticking as I slowly pull my wool sweater over my head.
Peter Ulisse
Hearts
You work with the old.
Every day meet loneliness-
feeble bones and eyes
facing the night.
So when your husband
speaks of “family history,”
won’t stop eating beef,
won’t exercise
it angers, scares you.
I too know of history.
Heart history.
Grandpa and grandma bleeding theirs,
an uncle with bypass at thirty-six,
father with angina,
aunt slouching in a chair
with oxygen,
begging for death.
Better to think of children,
the way they sit for hours
fascinated by the familiar:
a beetle, a toy, pots and pans.
Better to feel
on this steamy, summer screenporch
the ecstasy of food and friends
pouring hearts like wine,
the breeze
easing up your skirt
like a lover.
Steve Parlato
Her absence shows
in weeds infesting parched beds; in untamed
roses twisting the trellis back; in blown
peonies that drip gunk. My father is
gouging the upper yard, transforming smooth,
bottle-green expanse to minefield: pitted
grave-ruts, cairns of busted stone he’s wrenched up
from earth like rotted teeth. He’s forsaken
upkeep, chain-sawing evergreens to stubs
as iris gasp. Sworn off scrupulous care,
he’s ceased pruning; seems to have forgotten
her. Swiping sweat, he pauses to show me
the new geraniums. I swear, these grew
since yesterday. They’re called Elizabeth
Ann . He blinks, quickly turning, back to stones.
Amy Nawrocki
Noah and the Cave
The newborn sea-cave
traps a puddle, and the sheen
filters from the moon
that has settled not too far,
a blossom caught on the end
of a long string,
bulbous and wanting. He wakes,
shaken by the wind;
the honey-gold wine has waned,
but the stomach sours still,
his mind wedged
between thoughts of the platypus,
the ruby-black water,
and his own bare skin. Wishing
for the purge, for a spindle
of wool, for the salt
in his veins to sugar over—
for a rainbow—
he closes his eyes again
and drops his face in the puddle
and dreams. The night finds
its close; his lungs fill as tides
pull the ocean
to and from the shore, a band
of waves severs the breath.
When his sons find him
and clothe his naked skin,
the acquiescence
of light to darkness
echoes through the cave—the task
of rescue too broad
for his bones to maintain.
Every animal
saved, the world populated,
yet only a dove can sustain
this zoology
for long. In the lean puddle
he found painless defeat
in the shortage of water,
the cradle of human drought.
Molly S. Mellinger
What She May Have Told her Children Before Dying
Everything loses its romance.
Towards the end,
it is not every injustice asking tribute
that keeps you breathlessly alive,
but, rather, every incompetence
asking complaint.
Listen, one kind of pain replaces another
and the years begin to turn yellow
as the centers of eggs.
This feeling that trembled you
so wholly you could see inside
the curvature of your every molecule;
that walked the hanging bridges of your dreams -
one day, it will leave you to your grief;
but grief itself becomes finite.
Do not be alarmed
as the pride of living
fades out of you gently.
Pray only
that, in the last moment -
as you find yourself suddenly alone
on an ancient, ruined parapet,
looking across a great distance -
then, instead of by the wings of rapture,
you will be delivered up
by the hot, steady hands of the young.
.