Wisconsin poet Margaret Benbow sends a note of thanks for winning the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Contest honorable mention this year for work published in 2017, along with two of the five poems she submitted for the contest:
Margaret Benbow
It was a lovely surprise to win the Lorine Niedecker Honorable Mention Award, and an especially happy one because of its association with Niedecker, one of Wisconsin’s greatest poets.
I thank the judge for this honor, and the CWW for their constant, strong encouragement and support of Wisconsin writers over many years.
Below are two poems which were in my entry.
The first, “The Hunting Mother,” tells about the very active dreamscape of a pregnant woman who,
in sleep, believes that she must somehow feed every animal on earth.
The second poem, “Ode to the Scotch Egg,” is an homage to a bar food which I adore. In fact, I want one right now!
Margaret Benbow
THE HUNTING MOTHER
“The presence of baby animals in a pregnant woman’s dreams is thought to reveal
her gut instinct toward nurturing her young.”
Rebecca Turner
My duty was to feed and protect them all
and from the first night of the two hundred and sixty six
I had to find seals for polar bear cubs to eat,
hayfields for colts with earth-length black manes coursing
over their strongbox chests with the hungry hearts inside.
Red-shouldered hawk nestlings gorged whole snakes,
the springing golden guts of frogs.
Opossums no bigger than bumblebees
rode chewing their claws in my hair.
I rifled skies, bogs and winter woods to fill all craws and maws
and staggered home from night hunts
with teeming fish creels, bloody game bags.
Black-ice-eyed antlered stags bowed my shoulders,
groaning in the bone.
I was the hunting mother of the yellow-eyed
cougar children, taught them to scream and claw back
the grizzly who’d make them food.
This hard durance worsened month by month.
Finally my own Mars-red cub was born.
Now I was awake for good, and no more wore out
my ragged killing boots in vain
to trap and fish and flay for infant herds.
My one child needed but one single thing:
human milk of mammal, found
dawn to dusk to dawn in me.
ODE TO THE SCOTCH EGG
“It’s not any good unless it’s got some grease in it.”
Tina Turner
Take a hard-boiled egg and gum it all around
with ground-up swine’s private parts,
roll in ancient breadcrumbs from a bakery loaf
that’s been bounced off paving stones and
peed on by cats, fry the egg in grease that’s
been sitting in a kitchen pot for donkey’s years
and had a trail of little mouse tracks
capering over it, and perhaps a tiny rodent paw
going down for the third time.
Then enjoy this egg, this majestic cannonball,
1500 calories, 300 grams of fat, which single-handedly
acts on your arteries like a potato
rammed into an exhaust pipe.
Cowardly wankers will tell you this is bad for you
but actually it is good, because it keeps the heat in.
Eat Scotch eggs all winter, with deep-fried Mars bars,
then in the spring, around lilac time,
go out in the woods and cleanse the blood.
Eat burdock and cascara and senna,
wormwood and fumitory and mugwort
and in the next instant blast into outer space
shitting brick eggs and dodging stars
until you boomerang back, earth’s
sweet clean human angel.