Thank you to our guest judges Lisa Marie Basile (Caper Journal), Bryan Borland (Assaracus), Jessie Carty (Referential Magazine), and Brad Nelson (Eclectic Flash) for their tireless work in reading and ranking the 116 entries in the contest. They are the best and you should check out their publications! Much appreciation and admiration to all the writers who entered and congratulations to the winners who faced fierce competition.
First-Ever vox poetica Poetry Contest! Today’s Words 5th Runner-up:
Passages I
By Michael K Gause
Her face has already lost
the memories we have of her.
But we are not easily discarded, and
I will not turn away.
The mystery of passage envelops our breath.
It reaches out from the Evolving One
who once knew human name.
Now we see talisman, saint, clocks unwinding.
My childish voice finds her
drifting into the land left to fear thereafter:
Look for my eyes.
She tries to focus through the years between us
as I lean closer. Her ears recall sorrow and secret.
They’re blue.
But there are no words unknown to the dying,
and we are but the babbling prophesy of our own eclipse.
So I have decided to say no incantation nor pray
for time to wrench back her marbled trunk
into the sapling child of midnight laughing.
For at dusk she will choose old black hymns
sung in solitude instead of us
and beg our memory to sleep.
A poem that builds on images and emotion and turns on the silent voice of its subject.
This is the first poem by Michael K Gause to appear at vox poetica.
This brought back to me a memory of the final hours with my mother at the Hospice in a way that was so perfectly captured, poignant and peacefilled that I cannot believe you were not there with me in that moment nor I with you in this one. If there is any higher praise to give a poem and a poet, I cannnot imagine it.
A fine poem. I especially like:
But there are no words unknown to the dying,
and we are but the babbling prophesy of our own eclipse.