MEMBERS’ CHOICE FALL 2021
1st
Place So many ways to die Cindy
Hill
2nd
Place Salamander Marta
Rijn Finch
3rd
Place At the Minimart on Rte. 31 Brooke
Herter James
4th
Place Hearts and Hummingbirds George
Longenecker
5th
Place Over Cunningham Pond Ann Day
These
poems will be published in the 2022 Mountain
Troubadour, and will appear here later this year.
MEMBERS’ CHOICE FALL 2020
As with the
Spring Workshop, the Fall Workshop was cancelled due to the
pandemic. PSOV
members to submitted poems for a popular
vote. Here are
the winners as published in The Mountain
Troubadour.
PENDULUM SWING
In good times,
we were mystified by past
atrocities:
marauding hordes, slave-traders—
described at
length in history books. Aghast,
we read of
carnage, of heretics, crusaders;
of witches burned,
and many thousands hung
from castle
walls—all in the name of God.
But unaware the
pendulum had swung,
far removed from
the last known death squad,
our guard was
down. Thinking ourselves immune,
we fought for
decades for all who were oppressed.
Our recent
leader, self-proclaimed tycoon,
sought out the
worst to replace what was best—
defaming
long-held saints he viewed as sinners,
proclaiming all
was false that we knew true.
In hindsight,
those once pitied may be winners,
who plunged from
flaming towers, or those who,
due perhaps to a
weaker constitution,
died from
plague—to be spared the revolution.
Marta Rijn
Finch, First Place tie
FOXTROT
We watched a fox
and vixen court in woods
on a snowy
knoll. They wore rich russet coats,
white-tipped tails
and white vests, leapt stone walls
and fresh-fallen
logs in their black boots, engaged
in intricate,
extended, intimately-patterned dances:
they circled
slowly, slipping under branches,
then rested
together, then apart, resumed
their
frolic—racing, playing tag around
stumps, trotting
delicately, patiently building trust.
Their graceful
gambol slowly flowed from sight.
Marshall Witten,
First Place tie
THERE WILL BE SINGING
after ache of
night
bare limbs at
the
edge of human
warmth
beeches holding
bronze teardrops
beneath a
feathered sky,
birches born on
granite ledges,
salvaged clumps
of earth,
crumbled stone
where ravens
nest
and hawks
whistle, wings
tucked in.
Yes, there will
be singing
though forests
groan,
long-frozen,
the chick-a-dee
cruises close
to home,
black-capped,
wind-blown
as dandelion
spores,
puffs of
seed-song
a dee-dee.
Feel the world’s
arms
at your window
bringing you
outside
light-footed
to fill the
feeder
from an old
crunched can.
Judith Janoo, Second
Place tie
TIDE OF HUMANITY
A river’s flow
to the ocean cannot
be stopped any
more than the tides,
any more than
humanity
can be stopped
in its relentless flow—
as it has for
millenniums
across oceans
and continents.
There may be
fences and walls,
but they can
barely slow the tide—
those who
escape, who yearn for better places.
The tide will
not cease,
any more than a
robin in migration,
any more than
whales who swim seas.
A child on a
beach looks across the strait,
picks up a
cockle shell
and a black
stone worn smooth by oceans.
Seas and walls
cannot slow the tide,
of those who
come with their children,
of those who
work at whatever they must—
bricks, bagels,
lumber, paint, microscopes, books—
in laundries,
hotel rooms, restaurants, labs, hospitals, classrooms.
The flow of
humanity has never been stopped for long,
by walls built
of bigotry and zealotry.
We have all been
refugees,
have all been
migrants who crossed seas.
George
Longenecker, Second Place tie
NOW AND IN THAT HOUR
I will never
blow away in winds
from any side,
down any streets.
I will stay
wrapped firm about you,
soft scarf
around your silken neck.
No swirling blue
maw of waters
shall suck me
out of sight of you:
I will make the
ocean remake me,
condense in your
ears, and sing.
The umber earth
will push back up,
disallowing any
of its rocks to part.
I will melt and
mold them into hands
to cradle the
aliment of your evening.
Hold onto these
things, just till now.
Though a candle
fills this dark room,
the softest
breath trembles the walls.
Douse the light.
Still my scent lingers.
P. H. Coleman, Third
Place tie
ABSENCE DEFINED
How does one
define absence?
Yeah, yeah, I
know - the death of a loved one.
That is an
absence.
But what words
define it if absence is nothing?
Dark, blackness,
blind, endless space,
cannot feel, touch,
or hear - empty?
How can I make
it, shape it?
There is no
shape - there’s only
memories of
shape.
But no, that’s
not it ...
is absence
simply death?
Since we do not
know
what’s behind
death’s door,
maybe there is
no absence,
maybe there’s
only change.
Perhaps the
essence of anyone or anything
... in absence
...
is to become
what we call—
infinity!
Janet Hayward
Burnham, Third Place tie
ALL THAT REMAINS
My father holds
up a fistful of earth
lets it trickle
out between his fingers.
They make more
people every day, he says.
But they’ll
never make another acre.
He’s showing me
around the old homestead
explaining how
in the great depression
when garden
harvests could mean survival
subsistence
farming was a way of life.
The laid-up
stone walls of the cellar hole
contain the
ashes of a wood-frame house
while two old
wagon wheels with broken spokes
guard the
charred remains of a livestock barn.
My father
remembers the garden plot
beans and peas,
tomatoes, cucumber beds
points out
places where his father’s father
planted root
crops for their family table.
Land sustained
us, he says. It always will.
It’s the last
thing of value that remains.
He sifts through
another handful of earth.
And it always
takes us back in the end.
S.
J. Cahill Third Place tie
