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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2004 : Victor Lodato
THE BICYCLE HEARSE
Families paid the boy a few coins
to ride their dead to the cemetery.
Cars, seized-metal for the war effort.
Men, scarce-and those that remained,
too weak to carry a coffin down winter streets.
So the boy fixed a cart to his bicycle,
a canopied cart from which his father
once sold a great variety of fruit.
But that was before the war.
Does it matter which one? An old one.
There were plenty of dead.
The boy saved his coins in a box.
There was nothing to buy,
nothing he really wanted:
a real cake or a wristwatch.
One day, the boy brought some money
to a dusty clothing shop.
An old woman in the back
scratched out a letter in her halting hand;
she was not expecting customers.
The boy browsed and, from a shelf,
fetched a top hat of dark brown silk.
I will wear this for the dead, he thought.
He arranged twelve coins on the counter.
The woman nodded, no need to count:
if a boy fancied a hat, in these times,
let him have it, let him have it.
Several sizes too large, he was impressed
with how perfectly it fit.
And on the days he rode the dead
to the fields, in his father's cart,
he was a little taller.
And how the women cried
behind the ridiculous gesture.
This poem was a finalist in the 2004 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Victor Lodato
Victor Lodato is a 2002-2003 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of the 2003 Weissberger Award for his play Motherhouse. Other plays include The Bread of Winter, Wildlife, Margo and Zelda, and Slay the Dragon. Other honors include a 2002 Helen Merrill Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Robert Chesley Foundation, and The Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France).
His play The Eviction received its world premiere at the Magic Theatre (2002), and won a Roger L. Stevens Award from The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. His play The Woman Who Amuses Herself was selected as the 2002 winner of the Mill Mountain Theatre New Play Competition, and was produced by Mill Mountain in 2003. Other works have been produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival), Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, and a.k.a. Theatre (Tucson).
His plays have received workshops and readings at Manhattan Theatre Club, American Conservatory Theatre, The Guthrie Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, A.S.K. Theatre Projects, Primary Stages, The Play Company, The Playwrights' Center and The Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Victor has thrice developed work at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference. He has received commissions from South Coast Repertory and the Magic Theatre, where his new play 3F, 4F will be staged in 2005.
His writing has been published in North American Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review and Northwest Review. He was also a finalist in the 2002 War Poetry Contest for "Mother and Daughter with Apples" and "A Shoe". Victor is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers University, and a member of New Dramatists and The Dramatists Guild of America. Read more about Victor and his work at: http://www.playscripts.com/author.php3?authorid=203
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