We Will Never Mend This
Winner, R.T. Smith Prize for Narrative Poetry
Judge’s Comments:
“We Will Never Mend This” considers the death of “the last heron” and mourns it along with personal losses but also recognizes “the bizarre/ and beautiful bounty of life diminishing.” One feature I was especially drawn to was the almost exploding litany of metaphors breaking the narrative in the central stanza. I’m certain that readers will be moved by the poem, or in more traditional terms “instructed and delighted.”
We Will Never Mend This
The last heron died in the weeds of the San Lorenzo River in a spoon-shaped backwater, its beak that struck the skein of the pool and pierced the gleaming images below now a short spear on a frame without feather or flesh, neck concealed by fallen reeds as if the green world’s attempt at a blanket of concealment— that death did not sadden, that the skeleton of a frog lodged at the top of the heron’s torso, legs curled back and stuck as if trying to hide from the act of engorgement, the way a kidnapped child pretends in fetal tuck that violence cannot find him, the way a woman curls to fend the blows her drunken man provides, that death did not sadden, that I also had this knot wedged below my throat obstructing my breath, jammed, lodged and not slipping down or wasting away, a rock of sorrow wedged into a space constricting my lungs from gathering a clean breath, like an oversized frog trapped among feathers, that all of this was no coincidence, this recognition, this hole by bare hands dug in the mud on the side of the river and the bones and the beak sliding softly, feathers separating, frog displaced into a separate depression, that internal death did not sadden, but the knot coming apart, the grief following, hands rinsed in the river, the bizarre and beautiful bounty of life diminishing, everything at once coming unstitched– We will never mend this.
