BLIS Teacher Short-Listed for 2011 Bridport Prize in Poetry
Melanie Swetz, head librarian and head of the English department at the Bilkent Laboratory & International School, was short-listed for the 2011 Bridport Prize in Poetry. Her entry, "Mehmet's Lemons," was selected from among 8,200 entries.
The Bridport Prize is an international creative writing competition founded in 1973. It is one of the most prestigious open writing competitions in the English language. Thousands of entries, judged anonymously, are received from over 80 countries.
Mrs. Swetz found her voice as a poet when she lived in West Africa and has been writing poetry for over 15 years. As an educator, she has taught in Asia, the Middle East, North America, Africa and Europe. She has been at BLIS since August 2007.
Drawn from her environment and her personal experiences, Swetz's poetry ranges from poetic still life to edgy turbulence in form and content. "Mehmet's Lemons" was inspired by Mehmet's Bufe on East Campus.
Mehmet's Lemons
Melanie Swetz
In a plastic bag, not as important
As the bags of cashews to their right,
Yet far superior to the dirty potatoes
Huddling in the next bin,
Elegant almond yellow lemons
Sit at Mehmet's Bufe; waiting for me
To bring Tuscany home
(the more I bring home the more
Mediterranean I feel)
From this corner kiosk of homespun.
Put into a glass pedestal dish,
They float like Vesuvius's smoke
On Adriatic-perfect-blue tablecloths
Set with hugely white porcelain bowls.
Cosmopolitan aspirations these
Turkish delights have.
They outshine their country cousins,
Those other produce lying in wait
In an Ankara market stall, while the
Hoi-poloi buyers of the secondary,
Tumble them like trash into a cotton sack
To be brought home in a lump.
Everything may have started in Turkey
(Thank God for Atatürk!) but,
Everything sounds better in Italian.