Please join me in recognizing Mark for winning the June contest. Here is the poem which inspired him and the poem Mark wrote as a result :
When I Am Asked
By: Lisel Mueller

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a grey stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

When I Think Of Death
By: Mark

It was a somber assemblage
during that February evening.
Everything dark, everyone broken.
Most of all my grandmother
lying there in a shiny mahogany box
lined with white silken blankets.

Of her life and ours we did brood,
languor was behind walls of privacy earlier.
Woebegone, I approached her
And laid my love upon her cheek,
what she always adored,
as her fugacious spirit disappeared..