InterBoard Poetry Community
October 2006 Winning Poems
Judge: David Kirby

First Place

"The Song of Bob"
by Margaret Ruth Porter
Salty Dreams


Second Place

"Sarah in Gaza, 1956"
by Steve Meador
Poets.org


Third Place

"Joseph Kony"
by Christopher T. George
The Writer's Block


HONORABLE MENTIONS:

"The Thing about this Theory"
by Yolanda Calderon-Horn
Desert Moon Review
~~~

"One Winter in Whidbey Island"
by Brett Addison
The Critical Poet



Poems and Commentary:

The Song of Bob
by Margaret Ruth Porter

(for Fred Tarr and the Radio Room)

The love affair with stangers began
with morning glories between us, Bob
went to work at the prison at 6:30
as the birds performed their last songs.
He quieted Sarge, Berry and Coco with biscuits
before he left with his radio
on, yet they started barking before
he reached the first stop sign.
I want to be his wife forever they thought,
I thought and we kept barking,
as we chased his car for all time in our minds.
Bob talks to his ex 1500 minutes a month,
he doesn't seem to mind the cost of his past tense.
Why didn't you just stay married? I am
pretty too behind this fence made of chain-mail.
Twenty-one years is all he says
from the screened-in back porch where he keeps
his old partners, ex-police dogs, his detritus.
It is as if 21 years is the official
Americana. There must be one
hundred morning glories from me
to Bob, outflanking the trees
choking them slowly. Bob wants me
to be his wife forever, waiting in my war
torn house next door so he can get home
from prison to say goodnight and wake up
again to say good morning all over.
I am the last sweetheart in town.


You get a lot of value with this poem: the whole thing is a mystery, yet each line is as well. As in the best literature (think Dostoevsky, Melville, Shakespeare), the scenario here is vaguely criminal; there's danger lurking in every shadow. And the voice is sexy and threatening yet off-hand, as though all this turbulence is no big deal. What the reader gets is the stuff of dreams; the threat is enormous, yet you know you're going to wake up, or at least you hope you do. --David Kirby

Sarah in Gaza, 1956
by Steve Meador

The figs. I had to see
if the figs were safe. Without them
we would have nothing to sell or trade,
only some dried tomatoes
and hard raisins. The smoke
from the trucks and tanks was no different
than the dust and sand that filled our mouths
every day. The sound of the planes
like the scream of hot wind.
The bombs could have been thunder.
I was eight and knew I could
save the trees from the madness.
Thank God, oh thank God
the French and British
did not want figs. I held my arms out,
protected the grove as they drove by
looking for men and boys to catch.
Maybe to shoot. When I ran down the hill
my grandfather, father and uncle
were squatting in the chicken pen.
The French wanted to kill them.
Lana, our Christian neighbor,
whispered a breeze of soft words
through their thick forest of guns.
A captain flicked his cigarette at our brave men,
then the soldiers left. My uncle smoked the rest of it.
I saved the figs.
Lana saved our men.


What a time, what a place -- and while the time has changed, the place is still riven by a conflict that looks as though it will never have an end. There's only one stance for a writer to take, and that's a stoic one. So much ink has been spilled over the Mideast, and much of it amounts to emotional pornography, that is, an unearned excitement that leaves one feeling drained yet sickly. That's not the case with this poem. Hre the poet speaks calmly and laconically and in a way that is so much louder than any bombast could ever be. --David Kirby

~~~

Joseph Kony
by Christopher T. George

The Lord told me, "Raise a children's army."
So I formed the Lord's Resistance to fight
the oppressors in Kampala. My boys burned
village huts, killed, cut off people's ears and lips,
-- now their mouths stay open, the better to pray
and their ears strain to hear the Lord's words.
Some ask why we did all these things. Why does
a leaf fall? Is it not because God wills it?
When my children pounded babies in wooden mortars,
dare you question it was the Lord's request to me?
Now some name Joseph Kony a war criminal. Yet,
the way of my people, the Acholi, is to forgive, to invite
all to the mataput, to share a roasted
sheep. I will quit the jungle with my sixty wives
for nothing less than full amnesty, the shared meal.
I will emerge from the jungle shadows,
an old lion bringing the wisdom of my Lord God
to the young lions to tell them to let the holy oils annoint them,
a stone sewn into their garments
so a mountain projects to shield
them and all bullets bounce off.
And I will sing in praise
of the Lord of the limping and the lost,
Lord of the empty basket,
of the water turned to blood,
of the severed lips and ears -
the butchered lamb at the feast.

~~~

Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning couldn't have foreseen that the dramatic monologue would be put to such use, but that's what the tradition is all about; you take the best from the past and you ring changes on it. Here, a blood-drenched man speaks his mind, and we despise him, yet we understand him. A poem is not going to work unless the reader can say, "Well, yes, I guess I've felt that way myself." We say that after reading this one and then we flinch, not at the subject but at ourselves, at these beasts and angels we call humanity. --David Kirby




Honorable Mentions:

The Thing about this Theory
by Yolanda Calderon-Horn

Under the remains of honey daylight,
cut to stripes by white plantation
blinds, I sit at your desk, wrapped
in my it voice, scribbling my best

guess of why pumpkins
are gobbled mostly in the fall.
I plan to leave the theory
in your notebook: but it's absurd,

and we've had enough of that. I
throw my head back so that my
chin points straight ahead--
swallow hard, shoving unfettered

thoughts down my throat.
I want to roll my corners out
like this colorful Persian rug
you love, but I'm being pulled

from under you while words
hash to dust. And you need
protocols for the future
like a tin full of leftover screws.

~~

One Winter in Whidbey Island
by Brett Addison

The Bering Straits were especially cruel that year.
The Anacortes fleet lost two crab boats. In Friday
Harbor it never quit raining. The paper always
had suicides. That was the year Scoop Jackson
quietly died.

She kept the nightstand full of prescription bottles.
Her hands never touched the Earth. No plants grown,
no digging in a garden. Occasionally, a glass needed
washing.

The mill's Black Liquor ate up the soles of my boots.
Lummi Indians unloaded the green chain of the sawmill.
Ten hours lifting 4 by 6's and 2 by 4's makes you strong
or breaks you down. No in betweens. Nothing grey,
but the fog.

The sound of Navy jets doing touch and go's. A hotdog
pilot flew under Deception Pass Bridge and took out
the phones. The steer jumps the fence even with the tire
around the neck.

Back then the island was covered with Sitka Spruce.
You could drive to the top of Mt. Erie and it seemed
the whole Sound was in front of you, except Seattle.
Northern Lights kept the path to the barn.

I hear she's back in Tucson and went into treatment
after her last boyfriend died on her kitchen floor
from a hot shot. Her son's in a rock and roll band.
I'm here, still wet and shivering.

Alas yes, I was nominated for this and apparently, a funny poet named D Kirby thought it was okay and decided it needed some press. What can I say? Dick wrote and congratulated me and that was nice. I know Dick doesn't read many poems, especially mine hahaha. Anyway, I'm always more interested in his poems because he works so damn hard on them. Currently Dick is archiving his work and his life story, the whatnots and etcs. Something it seems a poet must do "sooner or later" so that you don't get that Prufrock effect. The women coming and going speaking of Michelangelo.

This poem though had to be headed off "at the pass" so to speak. My husband had to be told that no, I'm not thinking of running away with my gentleman neighbor Bob who I really like. Nice dogs too. That one named Berry is great. A drug sniffer and Bob says to him "Hands against the wall!" and Berry complies for a "frisk". Apparently, Berry was quite the attraction at in the public schools here. Around here though we just keep our distance. Berry isn't what you'd call, lazy. Nice doggie. Nice doggie. Sarge on the other hand is an old coot and TRIES to act the part of an old police dog but ends up looking more chihuahua and less Rottweiler than he should.

That being said, look at those other poems! What on earth was the judge thinking? CTG puts forth something I remember from the "old days" of CTG...from the O'Malley poems. This is truly what CTG does best and that poem above is gorgeous...when he does this, you cannot tell whether it is fact or fiction. I wish he'd do it more often

The second place poem isn't second at all...it is really a slice of real time. Figs. You know, a fig in a poem beats two in the tree and there are many ways to describe a Sara in Gaza but this one takes no sides and opts just to show the real deal or at least, something we can wrap our minds around.

Yoly Yoly Yoly. I call her, Yoly of the Sevenlings. She has written a half dozen or so of those (Akmatova-ish poems of seven lines only) and this wonderful poem ends with a tin full of screws. Something so very ordinary and in that, it becomes something quite extraordinary i.e. that you can relate to. The miraculous in the everyday just because we all have one sitting around somewhere, a tin full of screws. I can think of several movie titles that use exactly that rhythm and that nuance, that sound. Yoly.

But what about this other "honorable mention"? Indeed. From the Bering Straits to Tucson and shivering. Man oh man.
I may be a bit biased because my father fought up in the Aleutians in WWII and froze his little toesies off....and one night down here just two hours south of Tucson he SAW the Aurora Borealis as he was coming home from the swing shift in the mines. Geez. Perhaps the IBPC should have five first places but I think, if it were me, I'd place that last one at the top of the list. It is grand in scope, conversational in pleasure and offers no pat answers about why poems like that must be written and why they exist at all. They just are...unique and NO ONE can write one just like that:
One Winter in Whidbey Island by Bret Addison. A lot of distance to cover in one poem.

But yeah, Go Salty, Go Spitoon and thanks to PJ Nights for thinking of me. Or if not me, Bob. He is such a nice man.

Haha and when he buys milk (buy one, get one free) he gives us the other gallon.

And in other news:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20061019/wl_mideast_afp/afpentertainmentmideastconflictlebanonhezbollahmusic_061019175844

The Shiite movement and its followers have produced revolutionary anthems since its official creation in 1985, but the "victory" in its latest war with Israel has brought unprecedented sales and thrust its previously unknown performers onto the international circuit.

"We're selling 50 percent more Hezbollah music since the end of the war" on August 14, says studio owner and distributor Hassan Abu Jaafar from his base in Beirut's Shiite-dominated southern suburbs.

"We've put out 10 new titles since then, compared to only five from January to July."

Within days of the end of fighting, new CDs complete with images of Hezbollah's claimed victory and the destruction wrought by Israeli bombs were piling up in the shops.

Abu Jaafar says he sells almost half a million Hezbollah-themed CDs and cassettes a year but refers questions about his profits to the finance ministry where his taxes go, grumbling also that demand is so great much of his music is pirated.

Hooray, Hooray!
Ed Conti

a red apple, evidence
a delicious apple, judgment