Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting on the edge of a red velvet seat, awaiting the names of the top 5 Poetry Out Loud finalists at the state competition, those who would take part in the final round -- those who might get the chance to go to nationals in Washington, D.C.
For all my nervousness, I severely regretted wearing several layers of clothing. Then the announcer began speaking. His booming voice filled the auditorium. "It was a difficult decision for the judges," he began, and out came the names (in alphabetical order).
My last name is at the end of the alphabet, so I leaned back slightly in my seat. But name after name was called, and the final name -- it wasn't mine. My dad and I had driven 30 miles, my lovely English teacher had spent hours practicing poems with me, and I fell flat on my face. I had done my best. I went up on that stage and performed my heart out. I loved, and still love, those poems, but I was the only one in the room without a drop of theatrical training. Maybe that would have helped? I can't say for sure.
I'm naturally a subtle person, and I wanted to showcase the words of the poem, not my hand motions. Maybe I needed more stage presence? There's no way for me to know. I thought of the performances of the five finalists -- two of them would go to nationals. They blew me away with their voices, their poems, their movements. Clearly they loved their poems, too. Maybe I didn't love mine enough. I know that isn't true, but it hurts that being myself didn't propel me to victory like it did a month ago.
At least I learned a new poem -- "The Origin of Order" by Pattiann Rogers:
Stellar dust has settled.
It is green underwater now in the leaves
Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together
Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus.
It has gained the power to make itself again
In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal.
One could say this toothpick grasshopper
Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching
On his female mating. The tortoise beetle,
Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines
Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl
Of clever gases.
At this moment there are dead stars seeing
Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes
Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns
Making songs all night long in the throats
Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings
Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting
Rock in the shells of pointed winkles
And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught
In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions
Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words.
The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters
Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind
Contemplating the nature of itself
In the motions of stars. The patterns
Of any starry summer night might be identical
To the summer heavens circling inside the skull.
I can feel time speeding now in all directions
Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion
Of the electrons directly behind my eyes.
Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
I want to write poems like this one day, and I regret not being able to perform it in the third round, but at least it's still mine. It and the other poems are mine, intertwined and collected in the fibers of my mind, and that's what truly matters in the grand scheme of things.
