Tag: wind

“From The Front Porch” Wins Kelsay Books’ 2023 Women’s Poetry Contest!

~ Lynne Burnett ~ 17 Comments
Image by Capri23auto from Pixabay

After a bit of a dry stretch, I’m thrilled to report that my poem “From The Front Porch” just won Kelsay Books’ 2023 Women’s Poetry Contest! The poem and judge’s citation can be read here. Interestingly, Allison Joseph was also the judge who chose my poem “Tandem Hang-Gliding Incident” as the winner of the 2016 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit PP. 

Along with a cash prize and several other goodies, this poem will be featured in the Summer 2024 issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal, along with some of my others plus an interview. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on that – and an upcoming virtual reading. My deep thanks to Karen and the Kelsay Books team for their generous support of authors!

 

Pool Party

~ Lynne Burnett ~ 8 Comments
Photo by Angelo Pantazis on Unsplash

Not able to sleep:
a pool party happening
across the ravine –

all the happy screaming
bubbly voices
rising, falling,

washing the tired
lines of the day
from my eyes.

Is there something to celebrate
on a dark night that
has lasted far too long?

I would give up all
remaining sleep to be giddy
with the adolescent fervor I hear

and to pass it to the wind
which can’t keep secrets
and make you listen too

as I am listening now
for an invitation
to join in,

to celebrate so many bodies
all plunging together
into vast new worlds

unafraid.

An older poem, first published in North Shore Magazine in 2007 (and written a decade earlier). 

Autumn Flow

~ Lynne Burnett ~ 2 Comments

michael-podger-z_d21Hg7CF0-unsplash
Photo by michael podger on Unsplash

The west windows of the house cannot open
far enough to hear the backyard river
but the one east window, by which I sleep,
lets every murmur in, brimming on the early
morning tide with night’s collected songs
and a wind for dreams to sail on, in red and
yellow and green boats, past the branches
of the only trees they know, to land on the
shores of an earth that needs them, my earth.

To go forth into the day
in the wide pull of that current,
belonging deeply to the world.

The chill of autumn is in the air today. Made me think of this poem, first published in North Shore Magazine way back in 2005!

The Cry No One Wants

~ Lynne Burnett ~ Leave a comment

wind-chimes-952844_1280
Image by robson melo bob from Pixabay

I walk past a house in Tahsis as a woman
leaves in a taxi. Her little boy stands
on the doorstep, crying loudly and long.
Another woman comes and quickly
guides her hand like a missile
to its defenceless target.
The hard slap sounds through the street,
startling my every cell.
He is pulled inside, crying more.

The cry no one wants keeps banging
on the walls of my heart.
It is my cry too. Weedlike,
its roots travel hauntingly deep,
able to crack apart a body
or rot into tumours. By snap,
by bloodsqueeze of tears, by a
howling good grip, it will
unearth the light and live!

I say live like a river,
loving the drag of its boulders:
shoulder the cries that come and
carry them gently over. The physical
heart is so little, even for us, now big,
that it hangs, unnoticed, from the upper
branches of the body – not a windchime
until pelted by raindrops
or shaken, glinting, in a glad wind.

Another poem from my earlier chapbook “Stealing Eternity”. Tahsis was a town we visited on a boating trip many years ago, located at the head of Tahsis Inlet in Nootka Sound.

I will be going away on our boat shortly, for about a month, so you might not hear much from me. I do have a poem coming out in Kissing Dynamite early in September (“Zoo”) – if internet service is available wherever I find myself then, I’ll update this blog with a link. Happy end of summer to everyone!