A Way Back
Not only did Cara Waterfall win first place in our 2022 Magpie Award for Poetry, for ‘griefbody’, but her poem ‘harvest’ won first runner-up as well.
Judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar praised the poem as ‘a beautifully constructed palindrome … with a haunting atmosphere made possible by precise syntactical construction. The imagery and sound effects arise from strong verbs, dense with word associations that keep us returning to this lovely elegy that captures attention subtly, and with echoes that endure.‘
We are delighted to share with you ‘griefbody’, from Issue 36, Autumn 2022.
griefbody
Where winter’s last pewter resides,
a griefbody flails its sleeves.
Brute sky a church’s hushed ruin.
Evening’s dull bruise on snowdrifts.
Everything in a spirit of undress
along the streets’ blanched seams
— all this diminishing.
Spring’s melt can never repair
the rough work of time.
The eye is a gathering storm,
adrift in the cache of memory.
The spirit, a glum garment
searching the snow for omens,
if only to wield a compass, a way back
to the molluscs’ milky mantles,
to the dew-minted bracken.
To the dew-minted bracken,
to the molluscs’ milky mantles —
if only to wield a compass, a way back.
Searching the snow for omens,
the spirit is a glum garment
adrift in the cache of memory;
the eye, a gathering storm.
The rough work of time
spring’s melt can never repair
— all this diminishing
along the streets’ blanched seams.
Everything in a spirit of undress:
evening’s dull bruise on snowdrifts,
brute sky a church’s hushed ruin.
To read ‘harvest’, and for more from Issue 36, visit the bookstore!
Ottawa-born and Costa Rica–based, Cara Waterfall has poetry in Best Canadian Poetry, The Fiddlehead, The Night Heron Barks, and more. She won Room’s 2018 Short Forms Contest and their 2020 Poetry Contest. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize and a shortlisted candidate for the CBC Poetry Prize. We were delighted to publish her poem ‘Vessel’, honourable mention in our 2021 Magpie Award for Poetry, in Issue 33 (Winter 2022), as well as ‘Hummingbird Elegy’, winner of the Editor’s Choice in the 2020 Magpies, in Issue 28 (Autumn 2020). Cara has a diploma in Poetry and Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU. Visit her at carawaterfall.com.
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