Exceptional A Fantasy of my Youth Girl With The Gray Beret by amada      Ode to You (yes, YOU!) Contest Winner

Like a burning fire, your image burst in my lines.  Quiet girl: inspiration for my early rhymes. Placid, like a lake, in your serene surface, the roar of an ocean was rushing through.   Dainty steps, and a poetry book in your rose petal hands.  You looked up high, as if searching for a star where to land. A gray beret fenced a curl of your hair but not your soul.     In your placid quietude, my verses caught burning fire.    My cigar-stained hands, quivering, wrote verses about red roses. My frosty rational mind yielded to the ease of your mystery.             Everything in you was ethereal, like a poetry line…  soft, like keeping a hush, autumn leaves nested in your heart. The stillness of your pastoral town echoed in your steps   In a taunting dream, we walked together in the park, one day.   It was autumn, a sapphire sky was at its height,  and the early wind enlaced hands with falling leaves.  This nebulous, still image of what it was not.  Ode to You (yes, YOU!) Contest Winner Recognized Author Notes Author Notes: My posted poem here is a response to Pablo Neruda's Poem # 6. "I Remember You As You Were", also known as "The Girl with the Gray Beret," from his collection "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair." Pablo Neruda, 1904-1973, was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He is most well-known for his passionate love poems. As a teenager, in the solitude of my cold room, I felt warm while dreaming that this poem could have been written for me. This is the first stanza of the original poem: I remember the way you were last autumn You were the gray beret and a tranquil heart. In your eyes, the flames of twilight tusseled And the leaves were falling into the water of your soul.

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