Congrats to Janet McCann, who I've chosen as the winner of the Rondeau Roundup's Autumn Rondeau contest for her elegiac poem "Rondeau."
We walk through your city, this place where
years ago you breathed electric air
talked God all night with friends and called it heaven.
Now streets are lined with Starbucks, 7-11.
We walk through your city.
You look around for places that aren’t there,
the old bookstore, the Golden Chair
Saloon, the grocery, the Lucky Seven--
we walk through your city
which seems like nothing much, surely nowhere
one would remember. An old pair
of lovers quarrels, breaks apart. Not even
a bird sings in the autumn cold. Wind-driven
walkers hasten home. The trees are bare.
We walk through your city.
Janet McCann
BIO:
Janet McCann is professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she has taught since 1969. Her poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Australia, New Letters and other literary reviews and anthologies. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1989..
