 |
 |
|
The 2006 Thomas Merton Prize of Poetry of the Sacred
Sena Jeter Naslund, Judge
Winning Poem
Of how much more value are you than the birds? Luke 12:24
by Jeffrey Johnson of Sudbury, Massachusetts
If you can focus your eyes
on that bird on the bench,
the one in the charcoal suit
with the off-white shirt,
see that it's small and proper
with a formal tail tipping
and a head swiveling socially,
see how it flaps straight up
and lands on the same spot,
with bugs on its breath, see it
smooth and present there
and not as a specimen,
an example, a kind or a type,
as a pet to be held or a carcass
for the altar or the market,
but as a small bird on a bench,
then you will have prayed,
and prayed well I would say,
as if you loved an ordinary
and otherwise unnoticed bird.
Honorable Mention Award
Pear
by Gayle Brandeis of Riverside, California
The pear is like a stone at first, a monk
sitting zazen on my desk. I admire the still,
silent focus of its body, but have no desire
to break through its cool meditative skin.
Soon the pear begins to soften, becomes a woman,
a goddess, hips swelling voluptuous and proud.
Her fragrance wafts towards me as she ripens,
pulling the sweetness of her body into my body,
my senses full of her emanations, my mouth watering.
The goddess ages, becomes her true self
before my eyes, a fruit that darkens, ferments,
works its way back to the earth, a slow melt
that echoes my own body's passage,
the deliciousness of its undoing.
Honorable Mention Award
O
(Maui, February 2002)
by Anne Haines of Bloomington, Indiana
The boat slowed, stopped, small waves
breaking gently on the hull like breaths.
Whale watch veterans of almost two hours,
we shaded eyes, peered at glittering water.
That moment of pure and waiting silence
knowing she was near, then O!
the breach, explosion into air, so close
I felt it in my bones like a great drum
struck. Then struck again. The dark
curve of her body fell toward us
as she crashed back into sea, mountain
of a whale, the mammalian world of her
all I knew just then, all I could take in.
I don't know if I breathed
until she breached again, and yet again,
great muscular mountain of a whale, sonic
boom of a whale, whole planet of a whale,
wrenching breath from us as we stood
gasping on the drifting boat.
And then the holy stillness.
For those moments we each became
whale, breathing of her, surrounded
by her power, her arc and crash
an actual gravitational force as sure
as heartbeats rocking the salt water
world within the womb. She raised
up her body, her whole cetacean self,
between us and her new calf,
sleek and vulnerable to our well-meant
intrusions. The echo of her sounded
in my own warm-blooded body as my hands
touched before my chest like prayer:
O, mother, mahalo, mahalo.
[mahalo: thanks, gratitude (Hawaiian)]
Honorable Mention Award
Odyssey
by Robert Hartwell Tavani of Duluth, Minnesota
the last to port, I went the farthest out
to sea, shall sail again but not before
I rest the ribs and learn to love this shore,
its tree-Iined shade, the children all about.
I've seen the dazzle and the dim---earth swam
before my scattered eyes---and known cascade
of dark upon the heart that made, I made
the grateful good, and aching sin I am.
now rainy blue-light swabs the windowpane
and brings me back and back to rocking sea,
I rock with sea, the sea at home in me,
a drydock man who dreams in blue-light rain.
can man ask more who knows the port and sea?
what are you heart, what dream-tossed mystery?
|
|
|
|
|
