Brewer’s Blackbird
Did I dream the sun on my arm, the dike along the riverbank held fast by bones of forgotten floods? Who changed the sky while goldfinch sat sentry on the rose trellis? The air, sweetened with new mown hay cut just ahead of weather carried our voices to crows on the fence line, raiders of shorn fields. I stepped over the broad back of a dog, an island of friendship, steadfast as gravity. You were there, too, watchful and motionless in a fuchsia basket suspended among unwatered blooms, recording every movement with your yellow eye. Will you tell anyone of this ordinary day, and would they believe you if you did?
Judge’s comments:
In “Brewer’s Blackbird,” the poet makes deft use of the potentials of prose poetry. The “lines” reach to the end of the page margin with rhythm and precise imagery. This poem does both the work of visually looking like a traditional prose poem but the line endings are deliberate, each word needing to be exactly where it is. It is this that separates the prose poem from just beautiful prose—the attention to line, music, and imagery—which is the calling of the poet, and only the greatest of prose writers can come close to. Like the prose poem turns ordinary prose into a poem, the images turn the final question into a spell that lingers, the ordinary day is made into the extraordinary. What power poetry is!?
Dayle Olson
Dayle Olson writes in a small town on the Lower Columbia, just across the river from Raymond Carver’s birthplace. She founded River Writers, a monthly Astoria Writers Guild program on KMUN 91.9. Dayle is a recent Northwest Voices guest writer at Lower Columbia College. Her work appears in various literary journals, including The North Coast Squid, RAIN Magazine, and The Poeming Pigeon. She loves creating poetry zines and illustrating them with poorly drawn birds.