We’re pleased to announce the winner of the May WWWC: Rob Carney. Responding to the prompt ‘I turned to see’, Rob’s poem ‘The Librarian’s Story’ is an ode to reading, the value of libraries, and looking back on the stories of our childhoods.
Read his winning entry below.
The Librarian’s Story
Most times when I read, the words speak low
in the voice of my brother. Low
so our parents won’t hear and turn off the light
as if nights are for sleeping—
It seemed like the words had wheels attached,
like they were riding down the road of a story—
but right now my break is over
so I head back to work.
There’s a book in the stacks for every loneliness
we’re filled with, every love
we’ve felt feathering or lifting
from the inside out,
which is maybe why the library’s moving.
I turn to see it rolling
down the afternoon avenue,
then rising past stoplights and pigeons,
all the onlookers smiling and waving
while the words wave back.
In Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, Rob Carney honours the haibun, and gives it an update for the 21st century. These 48 essays, including sixteen collected for the first time, are all short and end, haibun-style, with poems or encapsulating images. These essays are impressed by the natural world, and unimpressed by politics. They are lessons on poetic craft, and poetic themselves. They are at home in the American West but aware of the whole earth, all its landscapes and animals and magic, but also its fragility since so many of its human inhabitants are reckless and absurd. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes reverent, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised is always smart, and vital, and concerned.