​Pandora's Collective Poetry Contest (2018)
3rd Place Winner

I took this passage from the pages of other mornings

The cat hides in the cherry tree as though a bird of prey.
Unfettered on a branch he ushers the daybreak.

Pay no attention to the season: it always rains in my poems
and blossoms go to seed out of obligation.

How is it rainwater never breaks, yet bends its shape around
objects that stand immobile before it?

The chickadees watch it all from a distance:
cherries and cat perched high on a branch.

Because I forgot to pick the cherries last summer,
by autumn they stained the stones where they fell.

I can’t be hurried out of this poem. Instead, I will bend
with this passage as water around stone.

Is it all right if we never receive what we long for?
Is it all right if the cat hungers to fly above the tree?
​
This poem moves with such little fanfare--
no use in recording further sorrow for strangers to read.
​
- by Angela Rebrec