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Nancy Tupper Ling is the Grand Prize winner of the Writer's Digest Annual Competition in 2005. She won 2nd Place for Poetry with the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association. While she is a librarian by trade, her true passion is poetry. She has served as Poetry Judge and Library Liaison for the Massachusetts State Poetry Society. This year her first collection of poetry entitled Laughter in My Tent: A Woman’s Search for Family was published. . Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, Studio, The Poets Pen, THEMA, The Penwood Review, Windhover, Radix, Mid-America Poetry Review, Flyway and Rambunctious Review to name a few. Currently, Ms. Tupper Ling lives in Walpole, Massachusetts with her husband, Vincent, and two daughters. |
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A bride among groomsmen, you stand light and white against a late November sky. Oaks and evergreens attend to you, shield your beauty. The harsh breeze peels your papery ribbons like sheets of shoji, bouquets of fallen bark. Your skin is yuzen, the way your inner bark, once exposed, emerges inky and black. I want to ask: do you know the family at your wood’s end? So many ruthless winters, still their daughter has grown tall and striking like you. Her secrets fall silent, icicles in snow. I wonder, will she hear you whisper wait until spring; wait to find the flowers inside your catkins, to watch the scaly spikes drop off.
Nancy Tupper Ling Winner of the Writer's Digest 2005 Grand Prize |
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1.
My boots thaw again beneath the pew. Winter light licks the stained glass, flicks the dove’s wings to flight.
2.
I played at Mollie’s once, her paint-chipped place above the package store, her father’s chair, empty reeking of sweat and smoke and beer, as if he were sitting there.
3.
The minister reminds us: you’ll be white as snow . . . .someday.
4.
Mollie and I would stretch our bodies across pew backs, along narrow beams, arms extended like Christ. Two young girls trying to balance, we'd raise legs upward, stroll the tree-topped sky, believing we would soar.
5.
I wait for a stirring now. . .
6.
This summer I saw a snake spinning, a tire track stamped across its tail, its thick black body stapled to the road. How it whirled mightily; how it fought to loosen itself from its grave. |
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I’m home, counting tea leaves; dark spindly masses linger in your cup. I’m not searching for divinations. Just wondering: how the brittle, the weak, awaken and resurrect under hot water, steep bereavement into fragrance? How many branches beg this body to sing? And, what remains here for me the way the tea singed your tongue, the way it clings to my lips when you leave? |
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