Academy of American Poets Prize 2008:
Co-Winners:
Sugar
I.
Late harvest frenzy could fell a full-grown man:
Fighting for space with the sun, the snakes, the heat.
The tug-o-war with stray dogs, river rats.
Shit—a half-wit with a machete could split your guts
Open before either of you knew.
So men with sense learned to work quickly and move on.
To leave some things undone—without amends.
II.
Every so often my friend Christina’s father,
Drunk as a drain with rum on Saturday nights,
Would slice stalks into slippery little slits
Just big enough for me and her: we’d sit
In our thin nightgowns, savoring the juice—
The real thing, he would say. The first real thing
Anything expensive ever tastes like,
And it’s growing right under [he’d kiss my lips] your nose.
Drink cost money. Women did. Men too.
But cane and little girls were always free.
They grew on every side of the road we knew.
III.
A Zulu man once killed nineteen young women
And threw their bodies in fields just north of Durban.
When workers burned the cane at end of season,
Swollen black bodies burst into syrupy flame.
He lived in a nearby shanty township
So dangerous white policemen wouldn’t enter.
They knew his name at number seven, but waited, afraid,
Searching for bones long scattered by wild boar.
IV.
My grandmother died in January, the coldest month
All year. But even so, great gusts of sleet
Couldn’t blow the bittersweet smell of gangrene away.
Doctors had already cut off what they could:
Her buttocks, a leg, two pounds of flesh at a thigh.
Pieces of her piled in the basement at Waste Management.
Her daughter was twenty-two. I was unborn.
Well, that was all a long, long time ago,
My mother said. You should forget about those things.
She slipped a pecan pie into the oven and looked away.
Destiny Birdsong, GS, MFA, PHD
Verses
“Poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can diviners or prophets really come
From catfish, cotton fields, or pinewood trees
Where black men hung?
Can Mississippi thumbs
Grasp more than coins or mud or tractor keys?
Must I be known for manners, recipes
For chicken, river swamp, my ivory hue?
Or steamboats’ empty hums?
My life’s debris
Is strewn like wind blown chaff for all to view.
Must I be known for moonshine drinks
That drip like summer sweat and leave a bruise?
Or monthly welfare checks?
I claim my ink.
I claim it from magnolias, heat, and blues.
And for my verse? The mockingbirds’ soft calls.
Or better yet, no song being sung at all.
Eleanor Durham, A&S, SR
Honorable Mention:
Touring
The Jewish Museum in Prague
We hold onto who was,
what might have been:
our conflation of centuries,
of conflict and conflicted,
suspended in this museum.
So, I’ll count stars
in the Spanish Synagogue,
number the points,
lose track too fast to know
where I started.
I’ll learn quickly that these days,
these sites, these places, are all
about counting—
its impossibility, improbability,
the way words about numbers try
to quantify when words
do not.
These stars are like that: everywhere,
each angle, in an intricate line of paint.
Is there one for each
of you, lost, six spaces
for lines to connect,
for your self, your memory?
A star for your family,
an angle for your story,
a line for your self?
By now, I’ve been
in that building, too—
the rooms of rooms of synagogue walls—
of names— a mass grave, they call it,
your town in yellow, names
in red, in black—you’re with family, again.
They’ve listed you all:
family name, name of your
self—a return to home.
I’d like to say Kaddish for you—
(but you’ve been named
in holiness, here). Apologies.
But those vanish here,
vapid, for many have tried
how many times to say how sorry
they are for how many things
they just didn’t do, just didn’t
think to say.
It would take days
to read
all these names.
Outside,
left from some other
centuries, before
we learned the art
of commemoration,
the cemetery sprawls and twists; stones
swell; the ground slants.
They’re almost on top of each other.
No space for bodies; for bones—how many layers
of how many human shells?
How many have toured your remains?
The other way—the Hebrew clock ticks, here.
How many have shifted on top of how many
photos of how many carved in how many
letters, how many of alephs of how many
shins and sins worn down by how many
storms and cameras, how many fragments
of dust and how many
spiders have made how many
webs between how many stones?
How many years, how many
bodies, just
how much dirt?
I’ll try to count tombstones,
count the possibility of skeletons, the dimensions
I’m sure won’t add up.
The stars in the Spanish Synagogue—I’ll
try to count them, too,
the intention, attention, of each candled flick of paint.
***
Perhaps the curators know something I do not:
they’ve been taunting me,
and it’s just when I see the box
of tephillin,
glassed in, alone,
that the tears come.
Because they didn’t come
when I walked in Terezin,
with the tour guide who spent her days
in the monotony of explaining
the numbers of bodies that fit
in the rooms, the boredom
of her accented English, as she gestured,
showing how few wooden planks
held how many people,
who sent us through the tunnel before
she told us we’d walked our way
to the field, where people were
shot, or hanged—to be made an example of.
They didn’t come when I saw
the dirt from all the camps, in all
those places they’d been sent
to die, from there, or when I
had to pee in the room where two horses
were replaced with sixty Jews,
with no toilet or window,
or in the secret
to pray (the way you all had) and so many Americans
wanted so many pictures, so many snapshots to say
so many times—I’ve been here.
They didn’t come when I got to come back
from Terezin and shower,
clean myself and go out for dinner,
eat fish, drink wine with friends.
It wasn’t when I scrubbed my pores
out, as if rubbing harder
might make the emotion come,
as if every drop of water
I used might have been,
must have been,
a surrogate for a tear.
They didn’t come through most
of this tour of all six synagogues that make
a museum, because they’ve killed
the Jews, and there aren’t any left to use
them to pray.
But, it was the light,
there, and the glass, then—the (protection) reflection
that made me almost miss this box—
it was there, glassed in, like it was
part of the wall, like I almost wasn’t
supposed to notice it, perfectly shaped,
and open, overflowing with leather
straps, scrolls of Hebrew cased in boxes
that should have belonged to someone,
used to, that those men would use
each day, a way in, to pray. They’re here,
now, at the end of this sprawled museum,
when my eyes need breathing space,
can no longer translate letters to words,
where on the wall, the sign says
Prayers for the Missing,
where the tephillin spills over,
twisted, all unbound
from the body.
Freya Sachs, GS, MFA
Judge: Robin Becker
