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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2003 : Darla K. Beasley
SURFACING
We waited out the war, enfolded in heartsfoil
In the aluminum resin of ventricular time
Observing a world encased in tinsel
Wrapped up in the ether jumpsuit of snow
The walls were as frail as a fontanel
The days were lungs, filled with feeble aspirations
The earth groaned with the weight of human coins
With abandoned satchels, sealed with old stamps and kisses
When the bomb shelter folded,
We surfaced as memories
To search, as one body, among the gutter-wick
Of all things imagined or true
For goldfish swimming in shattered glass
The exhalations of blinded moths
For the bells we'd heard nightly,
Their great, bronzed mouths
Keeping the time that we thought we had lost
As gears, and cogs, and teeth, we threshed
Through brownstones folded over like envelopes
For bones, the wine of everything bitter,
Must be pressed into a sweeter continuum
Under cement and wiring and bruise-cold rain
For voices in the rubble, held together with string
This desire for life that no logic can erase
No science can betray
No afterthought can murder
On an altar of ice.
THE GYROSCOPE
1.
In times of conflict, the body turns anarchic
The eye disbelieves what the retina is saying
So I must record what I know is true, what I've held in my news-printed hands
As I've learned that the planet is tilted, and that bombs eventually land
I have unearthed words, like star-crossed, stepping-stone
My tongue has been burned by Edison, cuttlebone
Pictures of sharks, a synopsis of Life,
maps of indigent light, the core of a bulb
ellipsis apsis Icarus aphelion
the furthest point from the sun
And still, the eye refuses what the retina knows
And in the eclipse that was September
I failed in my search for the apparatus
That would restore the earth's rotations
I remembered instead, how a sunflower bloomed,
Golden and fierce, among junkyard pipes
2.
In denial there is also a form of war
What I long for is a simplicity that never existed
A world made gentle with pliant hooves
A cycle that ends with soft machines
That spin wild wool and wrap me in it
I dream of primitives, deep in green jungles
Who would find the concept unimaginable—
That reality can be fissured by phallic rockets
That a box exists, with one shiny eye,
Which weeps and sings, screams and talks
Yet fails to fill the widening gyre
Our tongues lift to heaven as if the cord has been snipped
Words struggle, like sinew, to connect thoughts to the bone.
These poems were finalists in the 2003 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Darla K. Beasley
Darla Beasley is the result of the school of life as well as an undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing. Awards for her writing include the WorldWide Writers Prize for Fiction, the El Andar Prize for Literary Excellence, and the Andre Dubus Award for the Novella, as well as multiple collegiate awards from The Academy of American Poets. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Mississippi Review, Earth's Daughters, The Peralta Press, Diagram, and The Stickman Review. Her work is also forthcoming in Quarter After Eight and Leviathan. She is currently teaching at Indiana State University, where she is pursuing a Masters degree in English.
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