February 2007 IBPC Nominations, IBPC Nominations For March comp Options

[Arnfinn]

Juxtapositions

Revision 19/02/07

Earth Envy

Deep, deep is that purple distrust
that hangs over the moon’s eyes,
an inviting veil in some exotic dance.

She looks out on space
alone
in her craggy emptiness,
rocky barrenness,
at that supple, wet, glorious
green and blue blossoming beauty,
so favoured in colour
by that same fearsome sun
who burns one half
and leaves the other
for the frozen wastes of space.

Moon Envy

She is beautiful tonight,
in her mottled, gilded, lace,
sewn with precision
never faltering, arc by arc
into orbit.

Serenity pares her eye
then lends it light
unfalteringly.

From bliss, what could she yearn?
This mess of extinction arbitrarily
emerging from fertile soil?

This bewildering organism?
To be locked in the ever-returning,
what bliss!


I find this poem unique in originality. A poem I read and enjoyed.


John

This post has been edited by Cleo_Serapis: Mar 2 07, 06:13

Reason for edit: Second Revision

[AMETHYST]

I would like to nominate this poem for the dramatic tone, the striking imagery and metaphor, the well laid out inferences--and the fullness of subject. As the poem ends, I left feeling as though I experienced something-and it tingled inside, as if I was inspired. A really good read.

Climacteric

You woke today to an ache
you thought was spent, that season
already mourned and put aside,
flushed away like pink-tinged tissue.

It’s a late-March snow in February, far
too early to be so transient, yet
its whitewash is not unwelcome to the grime
of the fading season. Even now

as wasps tumble out of the woodwork, stumble
drunkenly, useless, on stone gray floors, winter begins
its end, always before you are ready, always
before your mind has softened

to the idea. You hold on too long,
as if letting go will lose…what?
That anticipation of the clean and cold, the muffled
and muffed, safely layered in wool and white?

Or the lightness that comes with snow?
It’s not that you dread the beginning
of the new, but the ending
of the old. How you lighten your step

when the earth is young, green rising,
despair the petals' fade.
Yet you bask in the heat of it, relish the taste
of salt, miss the sweat of it

in coming shadows. How you whistle
so you can see your breath
in the first frosty days of fall, and grieve
that last leaf’s bright tumble.

Reason for edit: Revision posted