WESTMINSTER ART FESTIVAL
2024 Poetry
FIRST PRIZE
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FYI by Janice Zerfas
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The government wants your dead butterflies as the numbers are declining,
so I read in Nature Conservancy, a one inch ad between
the symptoms of climate change,
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and the too frequent occurrence of marine cold spells. A memorial of Lepidoptera
artifacts, sphinx, spanning or skipper as well as boll, corn, or tomato fruit worm.
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I would like to know why butterflies count more than reptiles,
if a grass coddling moth is more necessary than a plain bellied or a brown water snake.
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What makes one species more worthy than another? Beauty, prettier names, coloration?
Locution? Sonics?
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If you will follow my attempt at logic, think of the harmless snake encounters, not venomous
walking along the Paw Paw riverbank; and how the common garter snake with its long yellow-
orange line ribboning black-brown skin hugged itself in the sun.
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How it circled into a coiled braid. Believe me, I share with you a phobia of wolf spiders,
mice, and Florida cockroaches.
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Who needs Buddha when observing a garter snake sunning, peaceful, calm.
So accepting of its self, its condition. Tempted,
but I did not press it with my garden hoe.
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So much bliss in one's body, doing nothing, unlike cabbage, yucca, and foresters. Skittery.
And do not get me going about tent moth caterpillars with their white-webbed glaciers
ruining fruit trees.
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And how on earth do we send in our monarch travesties, bubble-wrapped
black-lettered with the location and date of its finding, as if saved for a headstone.
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And how do I tell my loved ones when the come home from school, what I did that day?
Oh, I gathered dead insects I found by the roadside, a half-wing from a swallowtail,
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a ragged spring azure, blue or metal mark, and I stuck each eye spot in a baggie,
remembering the mile marker.
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I remember counting the eyespots as if breath intake, and what it felt like to have none,
recalling the last moments. Such a send off when there is no death rattle!
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I tell you: it is the snakes coiled in the river flanking branches nearby coiled as if pottery,
yellow-brown bowls sandbagging in the trees I did not expect to find - to nearly walk into,
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eye to eye. Lanterns in the daytime! Re-heated pretzels!
A bowl that made and unmade itself! Holding itself, and then letting go.
Unlike the rigid morphos, luna, flannel moths - unable to bend their wings, adapt, and grow.
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I plan to save the one that shed its skin for me.
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SECOND PRIZE
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Phenology by Phillip Sterling
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Tax day and the snow in its wet overcoat
is almost apologetic, having waited until the last
possible minute to comply, ignoring threats
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of liability. Even the flowers trumpeting
in the orchard dismissed the urgency at first,
the daffodils that - like avid government appointees -
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took spring at its word, a word we now find
questionable. Daffy as dill pickles says a woman
to the cashier at the garden store, in what one
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might assume is her seasonal disorder's attempt
to stay upbeat, in light of the snow's weighty return.
Yet isn't spring the time for uprising? for promise
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and possibility? Let us forgive the snow's trespass,
the daffodils their submission. Let us confront
the garden with shovels and hoes held aloft.
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Let the untamed things show us the way.
ARTISTS and POETS were invited
to submit work on the theme:
Grounded
MANY THANKS
to our 2024 poetry juror Anita Skeen
and to all the participating poets!
THIRD PRIZE
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Those Who Stay by Elizabeth Kerlikowske
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Like deer, we do not dream of somewhere else.
These are our clouds, seasons, our mud. We dream
perfected versions of ponds, ripples, their pulse,
and find something new in each familiar day, even
a reflection of something we missed yesterday or
a hundred times before, that jewel, that half-moon
through the early morning fingers of trees. We adore
the possum who flattens herself, but not too soon,
under the fence. Smell last night's burgers still trapped
in the grill hood. Our leaves squirrels fold into nests.
Our steps with no handrails we know by heart, wrapped
boxwoods, meals with old friends and eloquent bs.
Born in the palm of the Great Spirit's hand, like deer,
we are from this place, this time, content to belong here.
HONORABLE MENTION
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Worms and Dandelions by Nancy Nott
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Does she remember
when she was four
finding an earthworm
in our spring garden
carrying it to me and
declaring it her friend?
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She put it in a cardboard
jewelry box, lined with felt.
Here, I said, add earth.
It needs earth. Sprinkle water
for it to be happy.
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She slept with the box
and in the morning
was alive, but sluggish.
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Let's put it back in the soil, I said,
it needs more soil.
She proposed a bigger box,
a glass bowl, the mop bucket.
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She carried worm and bucket
for most of two days.
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Anytime, I thought, that bucket
will spill and I'll regret saying yes.
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Then the dandelions bloomed
all in one day, as they do,
and she became distracted from
bucket and worm
to harvest the blossoms, no stems,
pile them in gold heaps in the lids of two
shoe boxes and conduct them, like a choir.
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I returned friend
and bucket of soil
to the compost
while that golden music played.
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HONORABLE MENTION
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Decorating the Trees by Penelope Campbell
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Late in the afternoon,
three days before Christmas,
I stand with hands in soapy water and watch the sky
become alive
with crows.
They fly straight as line drives,
and I imagine their purpose
as they appear forever in my east window,
peppering the sky,
filling all the sky
out the south window.
Silently they land,
a great flock of black silence
in the bare midwinter branches.
The crows of spring,
as they nest in the ravine,
are constant and demanding,
insistent in their raucous maternity.
But these winter crows are
set like ornaments
amid the bone white limbs of sycamore,
mute against a bruised sky.
Perhaps they travel
this Christmas week
from place to place
and settle
for a moment
in a tableau of silece
to bring us back
to wonder.
HONORABLE MENTION
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Stalking the Holy by Christine Parks
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I take a smooth stone
only one
from those lining
the curved streambed.
Brush my fingers
against the somnolent toad
leave him dreaming there.
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Another stride
gnarled bark fragment
catches my eye.
Is there room
in the bulging pack
bearing me down
thrown off center
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or on the altar I build
heaped with salvaged
keepsakes from my
diurnal wanderings? Beside
the path a cairn erected of rock
and fossil to an unnamable deity.
Found bits, sea glass and shells
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strewn at random around
earth-encrusted offering
breath and blood
carving channels across
its rough surfaces to
placate, entreat - One lit
match ignites enough
incense to bear the weight
of prayer spiraling upward
out and back limning these
icons of longing and desire.
HONORABLE MENTION
Pond by Gail Martin
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When he tells me that water birds with stock this little lake with fish, carrying sticky
eggs on their feathers, their feet, I'm unsure what to believe. I want to trust people without flinching but my faith has been swindled. The day the woman with the white cane grazed my thigh in the cookie aisle, I wondered if she was really blind. Skepticism runs in my family like arthritis and homesickness. And yet I take it hard when my brother says he doesn't believe in God. Why? Stranger things than belief- frogs shed their skin and eat it. Leopard urine smells like warm popcorn. Lack of evidence does not disprove a theory. I can choose to imagine fish eggs nomadic and drifting through the air like pearls or opals. Darters, Shiners, Sunfish - pure fairy tale. Poetry. I can bank on that contraption, reliable ropes and pulleys lowering mystery toward us.