Amy Lowell Prize, selected by Doug Holder and Denise Provost
Paula J. Lambert has published several collections of poetry includingThe Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022) and How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020). Awarded PEN America’s L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert’s poetry and prose has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A native of Shirley, Massachusetts, she now lives in Columbus with her husband Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at paulajlambert.com.
What Grows from a Heart Stopped Cold
The trumpet vines had taken over the trellis,
wound their way through to the screen porch floor,
walls, roof. I cut it all down.
My daughters didn’t talk to me for days.
We had so many hummingbirds then
flitting and buzzing with the fat black bees—carpenters
doing their own damage; I had my reckoning with them, too.
But the scarlet trumpets dangled like candy,
half of the hummingbirds disappearing inside them entirely. Later,
in less-happy times, I saw a Walton Ford painting:
Limed Blossoms, read about boys chewing wheat paste
to lime the trumpets,
red like these,
so when the birds flung their tongues into the nectary,
ruby-red necks following, just like these, they were
stuck
and died
their terrified hummingbird hearts,
so overworked to begin with,
exploding in fear.
The little boys sold the birds for ladies’ hats—
some did it just for fun—either way
the casual cruelty of boys has stopped so many
hearts cold. Yet women bind themselves to them,
limed
by some invisible force: Scarlet finery, ruby wealth,
red necks.
It’s a hard world. I’ve tried to tell the children:
Be careful of what woos you.
Our screen porch now is surrounded by wildflowers:
bee balm, rose campion, canary-yellow lilies. Rose of Sharon
and butterfly weed on every corner. Iris: slender, elegant, tall.
The carpenter bees continue to buzz and thump. I let them.
The hummingbirds have returned, less drunk and dizzy than before,
maybe, less trusting, but hungry, and here,
where a house still stands, awash with color
of every kind, stronger for what was torn from it.