Sheila Wright Amelia Mapstone is one of six winners of the 2016 CWG Anna C. Price Poetry Prize. Her winning submission, Domenica, is featured below.
Amelia Mapstone
Amelia Mapstone is a sophomore at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She’s an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing and minors in Psychology and Religious Studies. Her major inspirations are friends, family, God, midnight epiphanies, and the mental or emotional struggles of life. When she isn’t writing or working, Amelia enjoys reading, drawing, singing, running and meditating. Being deeply spiritual and creative, her ultimate goal is to write poems and stories that enlighten, inspire, and heal.
Domenica
Venice is paradise in summer: Lovers lay in gondolas under a lemon sun,
sprawling on top of embroidered pillows and celestial dreams.
Stress undresses itself on the boardwalk, leaving nothing but relaxed Venetians, who know better
than to mask nature’s path.
Domenica Rosa, you were there once, weren’t you?
As a child, perhaps,
exploring the damp stones with your violet eyes and young bones. And were you delighted?
Or perhaps,
like me,
you kept your soul at home, safe and sound from wet ground and deep inside a catacomb
carved by kitchen knives.
Even so, Domenica, dear grandmother goddess of stars, stripes and pizzelles, listen
to me.
Hear my voice and embrace me again, for I must learn how to be as you once were:
A mother weathered well for loving,
a lover lost but never abandoned, a woman like
Auntie Mame, with a tasteful tongue for storytelling, wrapped in nostalgia.
Bravo, Amelia! We will look forward to watching your development as a writer!
