falling fast to drowse on moss-bottomed rock, floating
on foam swells to peace.
Only your mother who never forgave you
for not coming home to dinner,
who clears your place, fills a bath
with salt water tears, looses the plug
and leans down to hear the bowels
of ocean split open, listens
for lap of a paddle, the sound
of you rowing home,
night after night
prays to absolve the sea, bear dominion
over water.
Vicki Goodfellow Duke
Vicki Goodfellow Duke is the 2005 first place winner of the Ray Burrell
Award, finalist for the 2004 Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook Award, and the first place
winner of Cyberslam 2003 (Contemporary Verse 2). Her poetry has recently
appeared in CV2, Prairie Poetry, An American Journal, Poetry on the Way, and is
forthcoming in The Grist Mill. She was recently awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, for a young poet who shows unusual promise. Also, in 2005, she was awarded the Friends Prize by Prairie Poetry: An American Journal, and won the Room of One's Own Poetry Competition.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.”
