Dan Veach selected my poem The Blue Horse as winner of the grand prize for The Atlanta Review 2013 International Poetry Contest. I am honored, and humbled by the simple moments in life that make their way into the lives of others, those who write and those who read.
The poem will be published in the Fall edition of the Atlanta Review, along with other fabulous poems. You can order from the Atlanta Review website.
Here is a preview…read the poem The Blue Horse:
The Blue Horse
My mother wakes me at 3am, hands me a flashlight.
I put on old shoes, a jacket, follow her
to the barn where my father is already
kneeling by the white mare. Her eyes
are wild, her breath filling the cold air
with steam. But her muscled flanks
and immense torso know how to do this:
birth the impossible, life
from almost nothing. One egg,
one sperm, small as a thought,
an instinct, a desire. I had wanted
to see this, said, Wake me
no matter what. And here it is,
the new foal, impossibly folded
emerging from the mare in a blue silky sack,
as though brought here from deep under water
or an incomprehensibly distant star.
I stare like a virgin. This
a second birth, my own
vanished into bone memory.
But this horse: a kind of god.
In the dead of night,
I kneel in dirt,
watch his mother lick
the liquid sea from his fur,
nudge him to wobbly knees,
watch him stand.