Winning Poems April 2011
Featured Reader & Judge: Shirley Kent
First Place:
Resonance
By Diana Fazio
In the bewitchment
of our first glance
our eyes glistened together
as all at once I heard
the great resonance
of your song
with rapture.
The words you spoke
cascaded down
like music to my ears,
flowing notes of loving,
beautiful and humming,
soaring above us,
the canticle of a skylark,
celebrating
the rhapsodical rise
of our enchantment.
Then suddenly
the empty air
came spinning down
all around
without your sound
as I searched for more
of your resplendent refrains.
Never again to hear
your melody throughout me.
Never more to feel
the ardor of your symphony.
My highest hearkening
had become my silent darkening.
Imprisoned forever
within a ghetto of lonely quiescence
crying for music and harmony
Never heeding them again.
Second Place:
MESSAGE
by Thomas J. Pangia
though you couldn't speak
you had many visitors
I couldn't detect
the movement of your breath
as you stared through us
what did you see?
our future
yours
that you faced with a perpetual smile
you even laughed when
an aid bruised your arm
you wore your black and blue
like a badge of courage
your 100 year old neighbor said
you taught her the will to live
"it�s easy to die but
it takes courage to stay alive"
she looked me in the eye and
said "Mom will not leave till
you hear her message"
on the day you died I woke
with a feeling of weightlessness
outside the flowers had already opened
greeting a new day
when the phone rang
I knew
Honorable Mention:
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
by R. Baylor
In the shower late one night, I'd
Sung a medley from Aida.
When came a touch, soap slick and light. Why,
Here stood Julia! Did I need a
Friend indeed who�d wash my back and
Parts that in their turn might need the
Laying on of practiced hands -
While singing duets from Aida.
Honorable Mention:
Childhood
by Cyndee Bowdoin
Can you recall those
Hallowed days of
Innocence abounding?
Long summer afternoons
Dreaming of tomorrow.
Happy hours spent
On mystical ponderings
Of life�s possibilities.
Don�t you miss them?
Special Contest: Two Stanza Ode:
Ode to the Saint of the Gutters
by John Vincent Palozzi
In Macedonia was born a saint
on August twenty-six of nineteen-ten.
When twelve, her goal, to live without complaint
as nun, who would aspire to serve all men.
At age eighteen to Ireland she went.
Her mother, sister, never again she saw.
As Loreto nun she taught the poorest kids.
To streets she would relent,
in Calcutta, with stick on dirt she�d draw.
And then she�d start to care for invalids.
In nineteen-fifty Pope lifted restraint.
The Missionaries of Charity then
began the work of grace, not for the faint;
to serve the poor, the sick, the forgotten.
And every day she, without discontent,
went quietly about the work she saw
from Venezuela to the pyramids.
She never did lament
the constant work she said fulfilled God�s law,
for she had been His tool since just a kid.