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First Place Winner
E. Paul Bachmann, Hot Springs, Arkansas
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PROPHETIC DREAMS
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His country needed him in his twenty-first year.
With an unfaltering trust, he remembered
What his father taught him; duty, honor, country. |
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In time, he walked among the olive trees.
Between two rivers
Where Abraham and Isaac once walked. |
Comrades and ghosts, long gone, walked with him.
From Gettysburg, The Alamo and Little Big Horn.
The Argonne, Pork Chop Hill, and Omaha Beach. |
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The days were hot and nights cold.
He was patrolling point
Among the mustard-colored streets. |
Scurrying mole-like in shadows among the buildings.
Hooded and long-cloaked, they waited for the Infidel
They crept from pits that knew not hope nor love. |
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In the bright moonlight shadows on the walls, death waited
Small-arms fire echoed in the streets. There, in his
Twenty-First year, in a far land, the final page turned, unread. |
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Second Place Winner
Catherine McCraw, Weatherford, OK
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THE WAY THINGS DIE
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It begins on an ordinary day
You notice his fur hanging
from both sides of his spine
like black icicles.
Weeks pass, and you become
accustomed to his thinness
Then you discover him huddled
in a dark corner of the room.
The way things die is often
soft and slow and still,
like a small-town church
whose members age or move or melt
away like candles burning down.
At first you adapt to dimmer light,
but shadows have a way of lengthening.
One day you find yourself carrying
a listless cat to the vet for the very
last time, or folding the altar cloth,
locking it in the sacristy to crumble
into fine dust to dust to dust. |
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Third Place Winner
Judith Killen, Conway, AR
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OHIO in WINTER
It took ten years to love this monochromatic landscape-
To understand a winter
that shadows an older day
when ice flattened and stilled the earth it moved across.
A time when time stops
and seems will never stir again.
To catch the rhythm of a wind
that sweeps frayed nests from trees,
twists bare limbs against a lowering sky
and cleans the winter fields.
To trust those winter fields
so flat and brown they were almost grey.
To know they could be broken
by a farmhouse or two silos,
a man scraping mud from tractor wheels in front of a shed
or butchering a hog hung head down over boiling water.
It took ten years to see his raised hand wave
and hear spring beyond a lowering grey.
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Poetry submissions for consideration may be sent to:
hsfac610@hsfac.com
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