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Contests : Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2007 : High Distinction
LEAF FALL
Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron—
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.
And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful—
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.
This poem won a High Distinction award in the 2007 Tom
Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Tom Howard Books. Author Mike Burch received a $100 award. Winning Writers assists this contest. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Mike Burch
Michael R. Burch is the editor of The HyperTexts, where he has published three Pulitzer Prize nominees and recent winners of the T.S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov awards. His poetry has been translated into Russian, Farsi and Gjuha Shqipe (Albanian); he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times; he has won awards in twenty poetry contests; and his work has appeared over 700 times in literary journals and sundry publications in the USA, England, Scotland, Canada, Iran, India, South Africa and Australia, including Light Quarterly, The Chariton Review, The Lyric, Writer's Digest: The Year's Best Writing, The Best of the Eclectic Muse, Poet Lore, Black Medina, Poetry Superhighway, ByLine, The New Formalist, Verse Libre, and Unlikely Stories.
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