1999 Undergraduate Poetry Winner

 

Jenny Lagergren

A Walk on Rock

 

Flip upside down

to see worms

in lines of gray,

singing colors gently down.

It’s humming season.

 

I slip naked feet over

rocks cased in rainwater.

A giant nearby shovels

landscape left. The

smell trips me. I fall down

woods and worlds over,

skin a knee

scratch a rock. This, Limestone.

This one, a Mississippian.

 

Mid-meadow water flows to

a creek murky and shallow

passes a sign,

“Pregnant Women Should Not Eat Fish”

waters fouled,

solvent, oil.

 

Early epochs of gray

and white sky

spot my shadow

A starved tree stretches toward

the mute campsite,

a tent made of stone.

It touches a pile of asphalt,

rocks the giant’s men

use to build

concrete roads to

unimportant towns.

 

 

About the Prize Winner:

Jenny Lagergren is currently working on her B.A. in English Literature, and will graduate in December 1999. She was a co-recipient of this year’s Touch­stone Undergraduate Poetry Award for her poem, “A Walk on Rock.”

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