Lit/South Awards 2022
Poetry Competition – First Place
Amie Whittemore
The Peony
When I bow to the peony, I bow
to my grandmother, thankful
she’s dead, thankful she isn’t here
to witness the death of a grown grandchild,
the ache in her fingers like roots aching in drought:
to touch the grandchild’s hair, wash dye from it.
When I bow to the peony, I bow
to my grandmother, to my cousin,
and also to Jane Kenyon, who wrote of peonies.
She saw the beloved in their folds,
saw the beloved’s face crease and soften there.
She is also dead. Did her husband bend
to peonies to see her each spring?
Those widower years. His face a mask of sadness.
A mask the peonies cannot soothe.
I love peonies when they first breach
soil, their witchy hands grabbing sunlight.
I love their marbled fists
before blossoming, the many hypotheses
that live there close and hidden
as baby rabbits.
I love the way they are prudish
and seductive at once, hair coiled
in buns, the buns unraveling in wind—
my cousin, though she had a rose
tattooed on her neck, was not
what I would call floral.
She didn’t identify with flowers, their neediness,
their frank desire for sunlight and rain,
the way they welcome touch, the way
they offer themselves to the world.
I imagine her and my grandmother coiled
together like … what? What do you want me to say?
The dead are where they are.
They are not peonies, not even
the scent of peonies. They are not
a poet married to another poet like couplets.
Not even the small impressions an ant leaves
on the blushing petals as it winds
closer and closer to the center,
the peony’s core. The sweetness there
something only the living could want.
About “The Peony,” poetry judges Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs write: Watching this poem blossom is memetic of its subject matter—though ordered into discrete and measured couplets that gives it an appearance of order, it unfurls with a lushness of family history and an extended metaphor of the peony that makes it richly unpredictable, moving from mention of the death of a grandmother to the death of a grown grandchild, to the speaker’s cousin with “a rose / tattooed on her neck.” Laced between these is a meditation on the early death of Jane Kenyon, a poet who also wrote of peonies, as well as descriptions of the flowers themselves that we will remember every year in which we’re lucky enough to cut and bring them in from our garden: “their marbled fists / before blossoming, the many hypotheses // that live there close and hidden / as baby rabbits” … the flowers “prudish / and seductive at once, hair coiled // in buns, the buns unraveling in wind.” It’s a subtle yet masterful poem with a well-earned, resounding ending.
