POETRY

Strawberries

By Shara Lessley     VOLUME 48.4     2014 AUBURN WITNESS POETRY PRIZE RUNNER-UP

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     the Srebrenica Massacre

They’ve caught the general
in hiding sixteen years, who
slaughtered Muslim boys
in knee-high grass, hands
bound behind their backs.
A cameraman films a woman
near the unmarked graves;
every child buried here is hers
she claims, refusing to name
names. Two continents away,
my own family’s dying out:
uncles and cousins I haven’t seen
in years, and likely won’t again.
As for justice the woman says,
“hand him over to the surviving
mothers.” Accused of war crimes,
genocide, the man requests
                        strawberries: a bowlful
harvested from fields just outside
the village where as a boy
he plucked and ate them wild.
I am six months with child.
Of all the things a woman must do
to guard against her own, I think
by example of Judith—young
widow of Bethulia—and what
she must have known, almond
water dabbed just so
beneath anklets that glistened
as she slinked across his sheepskin bed:
Holofernes’s dagger grasped
in the hand she shielded
behind her back, while the other
took the sweetened knot of fruit
between her lips that found
their way to his.




SHARA LESSLEY is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale. Her awards include Washington College's Mary Wood Fellowship, an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University’s O’Connor Fellowship, The Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / The Nation prize. Shara’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. Shara is a Contributing Editor for West Branch and was recently Randolph College's first Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence.

VOLUME 48.4

This poem was a runner-up for our 2014 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York. Learn more about our annual contest here.