| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
SHUT-IN
Teresa White
(The Melic Review RoundTable)
Venetian blinds allow in bars of light
and an orchestra of sparrows
chutter in the locust tree.
I have lived here long enough
to know the universe is carpeted,
draped, that mountain ranges loom
in National Geographic, glossy
pictographs I cipher with my fingertips.
I am not deprived.
I have seen rivers on TV
reflecting light like mica on the screen,
heard the music fly fishermen make,
their supple lines snapping through the air.
Not even the jaws of life
could wrench me from this room
where I grow old with you,
where a flamingo is a black and white bird
in a dictionary.
Judge John Poch’s comment: “There were a number of ambitious poems in this March group of poems, but with ambition often comes lack of attention to clarity and wholeness. The first place poem this month might not be overly ambitious, but it is solid. While this poem risks that abyss of self-pity, it stands on the edge of it, not falling in. In fact, I think the poem turns, in that surprising last stanza, into a love poem. This turn is sonnet-like and what I wish I saw in most of the sonnets people write these days.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
2nd Place Winner, March 2004
