| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
FLIGHT PATTERN
Kathy Gay
(Desert Moon Review)
What is it about birds that make them able to crest cold currents of turbulence, catch sudden updrafts, en masse, without a wing tip touching?
It’s like a needle pulling thread through the sky in a crazy quilt fashion but with a basic pattern in mind.
What is it about us?
He held the needle when we flew. I tagged behind with the ragged end of thread--thought he knew our design, but his erratic pattern of loops and downward spirals tied me in knots he cannot pull through. So we fly
without touching, as if by the dictates of an algorithm written to factor in the confines of a low ceiling and walls that close in.
Judge Anthony Robinson’s comments: “A nature scene, almost sunk by a shaky simile in the 2nd strophe, that somehow manages to become a skillful extended metaphor by poem’s end, when the natural world has become the personal, and the awkward comparison of birds in flight to a simple stitch becomes a symbol of the motion of human hearts. Though maybe a bit precious for some (it was for me, initially) this poem is well-made and charming. (Though I’d jettison the fifth line, the only place where the language really bogs down.)”
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