Thank you to our guest judges Lisa Marie Basile (Caper Journal), Bryan Borland (Assaracus), Jessie Carty (Referential Magazine), and Brad Nelson (Eclectic Flash) for their tireless work in reading and ranking the 116 entries in the contest. They are the best and you should check out their publications! Much appreciation and admiration to all the writers who entered and congratulations to the winners who faced fierce competition.
First-Ever vox poetica Poetry Contest! Today’s Words 2nd Runner-up:
Seasons of the Mind
By Frank Cavano
A smile searching for a smile–an ovum awaiting
pregnancy–a looking down to find green rising up
everywhere. A sense that time is on your side now.
Hope in the heart of the young–everyone is young.
Back to hammocks, faces to the sun–summer is a
promise of long, lighted days–of nights made soft
by the warmth of hand holding hand and moonlit
eyes. Summer is the promise kept, a promise kept.
Oh, but autumn is a halved pleasure. At first the
smell of school books and crisp, clean air bathing
lungs. Then a preview of the long day’s end in the
hurrying night. First the scent of freedom and then
of confinement.
And now the mind is cold with days and Death
whispers “I am near.” But somewhere in that mind
a blanket of pure, bright Snowlight winks, winks
at imagined sins and dreams once again of spring’s
Eternal Smile.
A cyclical narrative, with individual beginnings and endings, this poem gives voice to the elemental and universal experience of passing time.
Frank Cavano’s most recent poem to appear at vox poetica was Is It a Poem? part of Contributor Series 6: A Currency of Words.
Lovely memory of past seasons.