You can hear me read “The Pear Tree” here.

Second: If you’re one of the few folks who haven’t yet visted the British Petroleum live spillcam, click here.

Scroll down to “Live feeds from Enterprise” and click into either ROV 1 or ROV 2.  After a series of failures, beginning with the failure to plan for catastrophe, BP has placed a cap on the stub and is in the process of closing vents in the cap.  The petroleum giant is now pumping oil onto a ship but details are sketchy at this point.  Warning: viewing the live feed can become addictive, rather like watching an aquarium gone horribly wrong.  One or the other camera may go off-line from time to time.

The winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff’s Admin Award is Gabriel Aresti Jr. (aka Ángel Chapparo Sainz) for his poem, “Nospringland.” For his prize, he chose to receive Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World.

All the poems submitted to the Spring Poetry Runoff form a stunning garden of springtime delights and more than fulfill the celebration’s intent to welcome spring via communal voice.   The fine language of many of the poems attracts my attention sharply.  But I had to choose one.  I chose “Nospringland” for the Admin Award for its heart, its sentiment, and—against all its appearances of being a simple poem in language and form—the intricate way it threads into a complex tapestry—the Basque separatist movement in the poet’s homeland.  “Homeland,” of course, is the matter the conflict holds in question.  Also at the heart of the conflict—preservation of the unique Basque language.  The poet’s choice to write and send an English-language poem reflecting the conflict’s effects upon him personally is itself a complex act, not the least of it being the sharing of heartfelt experience with an English-speaking audience.  Furthermore, given the Basque language’s importance to the decades-long conflict and to the poet’s identity, seemingly obvious lines such as “There is no more poetry for your fight” acquire iceberg-like ironic depth and weight.  As I mentioned in the comments on that poem, the use of punctuation—another seemingly simple pattern of choices—also intrigues me for the effects it exerts on the poem’s tone.

While “Nospringland” ran counter-clockwise to the general tone of the Spring Poetry Runoff, I found the poem’s language a deeply moving and necessary reminder that spring does not appear the same to all eyes.  What I might take for granted as a season to gather in communal festivities can in another invoke, in the changing of light and flowering of warmth and spring colors and in shared language, painful ironies of separation and the continued intrusion of the killing season into a celebrated time of rebirth.  Thanks, Ángel, for sending that poem.

to snag the frosty mornings. Mallards will
not light upon the weir, and open skies
remove their lightest blue. The fallow rose
is waiting for the spring–and like my eyes,

discolored branches search for green. I’ll count
the small supernal stars that heaven yields
until the dismal gray has passed, then smile
when May’s sweet-smelling earth perfumes the fields.

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For Karen’s bio and other Spring Poetry Runoff entries go here and here.

“Waiting for Spring” was first published by The Pregnant Moon.

*Contest entry*

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For Karen’s bio and another of her contest entries, go here.

*Contest entry*

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Karen Kelsay is a native Californian who grew up near the Pacific.  As a child, she spent most of her weekends on a boat. She has three children, two cats and extended family in England, where she loves to visit. Karen is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the editor of Victorian Violet Press, a poetry journal. Her poems have been widely published over the past few years, and some of her recent work has appeared in The Boston Literary Review, The New Formalist, The Christian Science Monitor and The Lyric. Her first book, Collected Poems, was finished in 2008.  Since then, she has authored two chapbooks, one published by Pudding House Press and the other by Flutter Press. “Handmaidens of Spring” was first published in Munyori Poetry Journal

*Contest entry*

Did your pockets brim
with grace notes that scattered
like freckles on a shoulder?

Were you awkward
as a lonely clap, sounding after
a symphony’s first movement?

Born one hundred years ago,
your death was not recorded–
yet, I hear a faint refrain.

Did you once hum across prairies
on humid evenings, or lilt between bramble
and heather on mud-soaked moors?

Were you housebound, gazing through
leaded windows while landscapes
blurred into the sea?

I imagine you, a ballad of emotion,
deep with French horns, wistful violins
and whimpering flutes,

ascending quietly into a mysterious
finale, while the cadence of your life
slowly lowered into another accord.

of poplars gleams like curtains made of coins;
it shakes at passing clouds. And everywhere
the magpie hops, I see another sign
of hawthorns beckoning the winter air

to breathe upon the fields. It once was mine,
that sweet transition only autumn knows.
The one that holds the oak limbs silently,
embracing every chilly breeze that blows.

It leads me into mottled shadows of
a deeper hue, where nothing seems so true
as winter’s birth. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse
of it beneath the vines, when autumn’s through.

would carry remnant melodies across long, dusky
hours. At times I feel this eastern breeze has lifted
me, somehow, beyond the soft-lit sloping fields
and conifer lined hills. To lands where only goldenrod

has known me by my smile, and dampness soothes
the head of every yellow aster bloom. Tonight, before
the morning’s crest of ruby will extend through broken
clouds, I whisper prayers again to autumn:
take me there once more.

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“Hymn to Autumn” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  It was published in Joyful!, an online Christian magazine, in October.

For Karen’s bio, go here.  (Scroll down to end.)

She is frail, her veil of happiness is
replaced in turn by fear, then bewilderment.
Today, she presents a branch before
garden lilies, like a child might coax a parakeet
to perch. Beside the magnolia, where shadows
meet white geraniums she once planted, the caregiver
settles her in a wooden lawn chair. Uneasy beneath
summer’s glare, she retreats to confines of her bedroom,
where lamps cannot illuminate rose buds
or reveal the sycamore’s aging bark.
Her cat, once draped on her lap, lingers on the lawn;
she no longer remembers her daughter.
Only her husband’s voice can pluck
her from herself, like the last yellow blossom
snipped from a stranger’s yard.

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For more about Karen Kelsay, go here (scroll to end).

by Karen Kelsay

Tonight, a slow release of summer rain
sweeps through my pear tree. Gentle is the sound,
a metronomic lullaby that rolls
across each limb and patters on the ground.

Outside my room, traversing streamlets run
along the open pane–I try to count them all.
And leaves are soaked a darker green, while buds
appear to peek between the lattice wall.

The scent of blossoms filters through my screen.
I lie awake, yet, caught up in romance
among the boughs, where whispers hum to me,
and all my evening thoughts have learned to dance.