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Welcome to Garden 0307 in
ARTELLA'S POETRY GARDENS OF FAME!

Click the links below to read the winning poems for April, 2007.

Poetry Gardens of Fame Index

First Place
Second Place
Third Place
Fourth Place




FIRST PLACE WINNER


Alice Wells



Nothing Marks Our Coming Here
by Alice Wells

Nothing marks our coming here:

no initials carved on a Spanish oak
no date scraped into the history rock
no altar raised in stone and shell

Tangled grass weaves a path to high
ebony walls,

entrance to a ledge
a marriage bed,
veiled wet and transparent
by eternal springs

Nesting birds echo soft words
once swallowed by the silent cave
words which forever linked
hearts that dared not touch
and left no trace

Nothing marks our coming here:
no ring of ash from a warming fire
no piece of cloth caught on a thorn
no petals from a wild bouquet

Yet, in a hundred years
I would know this place.



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SECOND PLACE WINNER

Abandoned
by Eileen Grobeck

The rusted pump sits idle in its watch
over the splintered trough it once filled for man and beast.

Nothing comes now to suckle or ladle or bathe, but the wind coats it with a fine patina of Kansas clay and rabbits graze beneath, in its shade.

Behind it a dilapidated barn leans out
to the left exposing its silvered roof, half gone,

and a honeycomb, still inhabited, disgorges slow, thrumming bodies from its mouth
like large flecks of soot from a fire.

Beyond the brambles and tumbleweed a house hunkers over the landscape.
Massive, it looms above a dilapidated shade porch with a gap-toothed rail,
front door flung open and half hanging off its hinges.

The windows black eyes have no reflection; their shutters snap and startle on the boards.
On the porch a twig-backed rocking chair rocks the resident ghost back and forth.


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THIRD PLACE WINNER



Early Morning Existentials
by Arlene L. Mandell

Waking/dream/time apparition
shy child offers
treasure box of crayons.

Reality F R/ AC T/ UR E S silence,
cat cries, coffee brews,
newspaper u n f u r l s,

little girl vanishes,
periwinkle, sea green
scribbles f a d e



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FOURTH PLACE WINNER

Breaking Open
by Kelly Richards

Heartache,
you hit me hard
like a rumbling earthquake
First moaning deep and low
then rushing up like roaring thunder
toppling the snaking rows of dominoes
of how I thought things ought to go

Shattering me like a clay piggybank
Scattering the precious things I saved inside
Everything I relied on tossed to the floor
like an old rag doll
that didn’t matter anymore

What is left of me?

All of me

Breaking into pieces
awakened me
released me

Breaking open
I can see.


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