Award Winners
The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award - 2010
Marlene Rosen Fine
LOVE CONTINUES IN THE BODY
Love continues in the body—
sea in the shell.
Those who hold the body
listen well.
Learn the sound—
of the rise and the fall
of the invisible.
Memorize it all.
The body having lived in love
rings like a bell—
when held again in the hands
of one—musical.
Marie Ponsot on Marlene Rosen Fine
Here's a ravishing lyric. Syntax and sense dance out its music: a first stanza of assertion, a second of directive command, and an agile third, which opens out upon a quiet height of human joy. The poem's only adjective is its last word: it hums with summative, accumulated power.