This year at the Utah State Poet Society Annual Contest she won a first prize and an honorable mention. Below are her two award winning poems. "The Question" won first prize and "Dreaming Herself Alive" won an honorable mention.
She gave me permission to post her poems - but remember that her poems are copyrighted.
The Question
Desire in the eyes
of the boy,
hands on her waist
waiting permission.
Smiling like someone
just given
an unopened gift.
A rolled up Navy uniform
reveals her nickname,
“Bunny,”
sewn into his arm.
The photograph fits
in the book,
before my father.
“Would I still be
your little girl,” I ask,
“if you had married him?”
She winks at me.
The question floats
over us,
into the past.
I tilt the picture sideways,
away from the ending.
A fiery harbor,
a plane flying
too close to it,
singed the sky black,
the boy who flew.
I take one more
guilty look at his face.
The man who could have
erased me.
~Stacy W. Julin
reveals her nickname,
“Bunny,”
sewn into his arm.
The photograph fits
in the book,
before my father.
“Would I still be
your little girl,” I ask,
“if you had married him?”
She winks at me.
The question floats
over us,
into the past.
I tilt the picture sideways,
away from the ending.
A fiery harbor,
a plane flying
too close to it,
singed the sky black,
the boy who flew.
I take one more
guilty look at his face.
The man who could have
erased me.
~Stacy W. Julin
Dreaming Herself Alive
She had hair the color of the sun
when it’s too bright to look at.
Ex-husbands she prayed
she would not see in heaven.
Her life went by as a season.
Changing color like leaves,
drying up before their wonder
can be revealed.
Songs came to her in dreams.
She could play them upon waking,
in the dark.
Her fingers dribbling
up and down the piano keys.
Paintings on her walls,
mostly unfinished,
landscapes of places not visited.
She was an old woman
with a clock and a floor heater,
always keeping rhythm.
Reading the Bible, Frost, Dickinson.
From her blue chair,
she fed me words
that ran around my head
and down my spine.
She’s a dreamer, people said.
But when the color left her eyes
along with the faces in her scrapbook,
it was all there still,
in her vivid
musical dark.
~Stacy W. Julin
She had hair the color of the sun
when it’s too bright to look at.
Ex-husbands she prayed
she would not see in heaven.
Her life went by as a season.
Changing color like leaves,
drying up before their wonder
can be revealed.
Songs came to her in dreams.
She could play them upon waking,
in the dark.
Her fingers dribbling
up and down the piano keys.
Paintings on her walls,
mostly unfinished,
landscapes of places not visited.
She was an old woman
with a clock and a floor heater,
always keeping rhythm.
Reading the Bible, Frost, Dickinson.
From her blue chair,
she fed me words
that ran around my head
and down my spine.
She’s a dreamer, people said.
But when the color left her eyes
along with the faces in her scrapbook,
it was all there still,
in her vivid
musical dark.
~Stacy W. Julin
The above poems are copyrighted to the author, Stacy Julin and may not be used without her consent.
1 comment:
These poems are amazing... I wish I could write something more than fun limericks. I re-sent the sugar cookie recipe. If you didn't get it, send me an email - kmtn30@gmail.com and I'll keep trying.
Post a Comment