First Place

If I Forget You, Jerusalem
By Vincent Giegerich
Louisville, Kentucky

(On visiting Merle Hay Plaza in Des Moines, where sixty years ago stood the monastic seminary of St. Gabriel.)
 
No rumor of death did we detect in the wind’s howl,
too enraptured how the taste of youth unquenchable
ballooned our lungs, stung burgeoned sinews when we ran,
ran, ran cross raw-cut fields, up tilted hills, and next to
slippery creek beds. Those were days we laughed invincible,
impervious to the wind’s bite on our solitary, sandaled
marches through drifted leaves or flecking snows, while
in a world we’d left behind, conscripted brothers, friends,
watched their toes freeze blue in wet Korean trenches.
 
Now that wind, to which even mules, we were
admonished, had sense enough to turn their backsides,
whips and whistles still over the hills northwest,
between malled shops, around department stores and
past where landscaped parking lots obliterate each
single footprint left chasing down our softballs and
wild rabbits, hush every last matins and lauds once
we sang to hallow the vault of tall midnights.
 
Well may we wonder were we really here those drunken
days of first our love? Or were what seemed the
perfect years we memorized scholastic proofs
and felt old scriptures burn inside our hearts
as newly hot as any sanctuary lamp
some merely spell, to now be disenchanted?
 
And I shall answer: this place inhabits still the
ecstasies we stirred in it, the sacred visions so
enthralled us, what promises we promised then
to keep. The place carries us still in its heart
and we carry still the place. No wind, however
framed with crackling thunder, came to destroy
what memory holds true in the heart. What came was
work of greed, perhaps, or even human progress (take
your pick): the inexorable change precludes, as Heraclitus
thought, our splashing twice one river and the same.
 
The wind marks still the place. The wind, the wind
bears witness in this place, affirms, redeems, when
all is done or said, each element in every one of us is
vital and sweet and of God -- his kiss, as we felt it
once this very place, warm on our cheeks, yes, still.

 


 

Honorable Mention

You Must Allow You are Made of Glass
By Sarah Sousa
Ashfield, Massachusetts

You must allow you are made of glass
when witnessing the blue
tufts of marsh grass catch, orange
blaze hop-scotching from island
to island;  the way light first
punctuates you here and here—flags
pinned on a map—
then fills you as it would a flask.
The dead trees’ spires jut up
to jagged heights, crowned
with leaden crows like cankers
on the bones. Scaffold upon scaffold
gains the sky but the sky becomes
heel. You must know
you are glass, when, turning away
from the light
inks you out completely.
What is bearable for the paper
weight, layered with lace-
edged violets and trapped
bubbles of the milky
way— is precarious
for the thin walled model heart,
ethyl clear anatomical heart;
passed from hand to hand.
Taken up. Set down. Filling
with the day’s bruised
and incidental light, you
must allow you were made
of glass. But in the fashion of
an ornament blown hollow.

 

Anniversary
By Laura Sobbott Ross
Sorrento, Florida

Some say this many acorns
mean a harsh winter, patience,
fruition of an arduous labor.
Beneath the womb
shaped nutshell, whole trees
distilled into winter’s dark
germination.
As we come and go,
I think of sisters praying
a novena, paper bag plain
beads of acorn
sliding from their fingers,
a circle growing around us.
Harbinger of fertility,
protection from storms
and waywardness,
I sweep them from our walkway,
level the rain channeled brim
with a rosary’s worth of winter,
and I think of you,
the wild earth chanting softly.

 

I Love a Wall
By B. E. Stock
Brooklyn, New York

I love a wall, a certain kind of wall,
Where ivy clings or moss accumulates,
That hides the children wrestling for a ball
Or the retired professor’s wife who prates.

Walls are so critical, wise planners build
A wall of water, art or flower pots
To calm a city plaza worker-filled,
Or hide the obscenity of empty lots.

They long for walls who labor in a “pen”
- That nosey, loud, computer cluttered room
Where bulls prevail, or lions, but not men,
Though even there one sees a cactus bloom.

It’s easy to reflect behind a wall,
To change a thought or find a hidden world,
While those outside, by mystery unfurled,
Can hear their own forgotten voices call.