Senior poet receives national honors

Herbert Siegel, 75, of Long Beach, a retired CEO who served on numerous corporate and bank boards, won the 2009 New York Senior Poet Laureate Award for his poem "Monuments" in the 17th annual national Senior Poets Laureate Poetry Competition for American poets age 50 and older.

The yearly literary event, sponsored by Amy Kitchener's Angels Without Wings Fdn. of Monterey, Calif., is open to all American poets born before 1959 regardless of where they live.

Siegel was created three collections of poems over half a century and continues writing.

Monuments

Generals sit erect, while marble horses

rear high; fallen comrades lie etched beneath.

Presidents in chiseled rocks—bodiless

soldiers entombed—wrapped daily in a wreath.

Obelisks soar, marking feats of heroism; granite arches harbor battles won and lost;

Gravestones hiding dead from vandalism—iconic landmarks stand in sun and frost.

Yet, end comes to stone and the names thereon

as mountains wear, glaciers melt, and trees die,

mocking man's monolith phenomenon

made to defy mortality-gone-awry.

Barbarism cut into weathered rocks,

the refuge of sword, but not cynic;

cloaked in swarming pigeons that come in flocks,

these edifices are but metaphoric.