Thank you to everyone who sent in a poem to our Spring Poetry Contest, Lhude Sing Cuccu. Over 2,000 poems came flooding into our e-mailbox, a tidal outpouring of spring fever, and we read every single one. From these we chose fifteen poems to be read on our show on Saturday, March 31, one of which will win a Sleep Number bed from Select Comfort and three-dozen roses. Link >>
It’s been 15 years since I wrote poetry for a creating writing class in college, but the chance of winning a nifty new bed had me picking up a pencil again (have you seen the prices of good mattress and box spring sets lately? I am Dutch you know…).
I should have known that the audience of A Prairie Home Companion would be a highly literate and competitive one in this case - my entry failed to even place in the top 15. I’m not surprised, really - I had no idea what I was doing, and while I do read poetry to my kids on occasion I’m hardly a connoisseur.
At any rate, since I can’t to link to a podcast of Garrison Keillor reading it, here is a text version of my entry:
Resolve
kids on rediscovered bikes swarm the street
skunk-striped with splattered melt-puddle
the afternoon sun spotlights the window
through icicles with liquid starbust tips
she reposes neglected in the horizontal rays
indignant anticipation under a thin sheet
roof-drifts melt into gurgling gutters
amplifying the silence between us
september plans and october promises buried
under a thousand shovel-fulls of snow
I repeat newly defrosted excuses
the holidays…the weather…my work…my wife
meteorologist map-tracing touches
send warm-fronts of intent rippling through the sheet
a whisper-twitch from my hand
exposes lines and curves long unseen
a touched button sends the floodgate up
spring-fed resolve rushes swirling into the workshop
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