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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2002 : Laurel Blossom
THE NEAR OCCASION OF SIN
To Miss Marianne Moore
Hairy face, skin wings, eyeteeth of bone, black
thought of it swinging from the chandelier, upside down above
me in my bed: I too dislike it. I hear whirring
and its squeaky voice in my dreams: it wakes me, years after.
He says be grateful, you could be one of the undead. Even so,
To clip the tiny bombs to their blind bodies,
load them by the hundreds
on B-29s, and drop them where the rising sun could warm them
as they fell, so they wakened like the dream
where you don't hit bottom; then, as if by radar, flew
under eaves, feeding on insects and resting for an hour, until
they exploded, little bat-bombs
burning the whole city flat and everyone smoldering
in it: it makes me sick. He says
this never happened, be grateful
the A-bombs bat-bombs were invented to come after, like letters
in the alphabet of a new world language, worked: Word made
flash. Ah, poetry!
couldst thou make shadows of mine enemies
on walls of Sumitomo Banks and Pentagons, etc., half-lives
decaying in some circle of hell, flapping overhead
or clinging by their little claws
to the one source of firepower in the room: but no,
traitor, you turn me into them, you bite. Even tonight,
when he rolls over to kiss me in his sleep, I shudder
or tremble, thinking of the greener grass that grew
after Hiroshima, the root of our ginger
that scratched through its plastic pot to get at the ground.
This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2002 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Laurel Blossom received a $50 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Laurel Blossom
Laurel Blossom's most recent book of poetry is The Papers Said (Greenhouse Review Press, 1993).
Earlier books include What's Wrong (Cobham & Hatherton Press, 1987) and Any Minute (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979).
Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, and in national journals including Poetry,
The American Poetry Review, Pequod, The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly,
Deadsnake Apotheosis, Many Mountains Moving and others. She recently completed a book-length poem,
"Degrees of Latitude", the first in a projected trilogy. See her website at
http://www.laurelblossom.com/
Blossom is the editor of Splash! Great Writing About Swimming (Ecco Press, 1996) and
Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community (Milkweed Editions, 1997).
Blossom has received fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the New
York Foundation for the Arts,
the Ohio Arts
Council, the Atlantic
Center for the Arts and the Squaw
Valley Community of Writers.
She also received a scholarship at the Bread
Loaf Writers' Conference and a residency at Yaddo.
She serves on the Board of Regents of Harris
Manchester College, Oxford University, where she holds a Foundation Fellowship.
She co-founded The Writers Community, an esteemed writing residency and workshop program,
and serves as chair of the Writers Community Committee of the YMCA National Writer's Voice.
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