Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the NEPC Board
Narwhal
Hall’s Bay is a china plate.
I skate far out to the breathing hole
where the men chop the ice away.
The echo of auger and axe
grapples the lip of hills.
They are building a lung for whales –
a pair of humpbacks, a narwhal
surfacing through the slush.
The little narwhal lingers,
mottled backed, steaming.
Its eye oily in the dark cup,
me mirrored in the eye-slick,
the horn spiraling into brittle air.
Caribou on a Slab of Plywood in Our Garden
My father says they are so pretty, caribou. And they are.
I smooth one’s head around the muzzle, splay of white
above the mouth, back toward the soft cheek.
The caribou’s eyes are open so I sing to it
hush-a-bye, don’t you cry
I have a pretty voice. My father hums along,
and cuts away the skin from the severed hind quarter,
or rather cuts, then lifts the skin back as if he were helping
a woman remove her coat when she’s come in from the cold.
New-found-land
The sea is ten thousand
thousand bright occurrences.
Tides rise up and ice,
call and reply.
History falls away – first
light recalled, dimming.
This is where
to shake off sorrow like dust
along a track of hills
risen like a sleeper’s hip,
dark water slipping.
~
Gannets with their golden crowns
lie down, steeped in forgiveness.
High tides rise too high.
Ribs of skiffs jut like cathedrals.
It is very late for the earth.
~
Whales squint like shadows, unsee
what has been seen, the abundant view.
There’s frost on their lids. They dream
of beach plums, the winter beach strewn blue
with muscles sucked dry
~
In the beginning Conception Bay
was gold in that soft belly of kelp.
There were green rocks
smoothed and thrown to oval,
and squids full of circular scars.
Whales slid like the scythes of Armageddon
that reeked of dying.
~
Whales did not invent this,
but here they are,
their backs all blade
and anarchy gunwale to gunwale,
the body of a world that never sees the sun.
Carol Hobbs is a poet and educator with Massachusetts Public Schools. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies throughout the United States and Canada. Hobbs’s recent book New-found-land, available through Main Street Rag in North Carolina, received honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize with the NEPC, and a New England PEN Discovery Prize.