Contest #1:
April 8: Stormy Weather
April is a time of sudden and wild-pitched storms, cold fronts bringing a panorama of lightning and occasional hail, tornado watches and long nights tracking the storm. Write about a time that a storm in any season was central or in the background of something happening. For inspiration, read this poem by William Stafford, featured in 150 Kansas Poems on March 28:
Assurance
You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightning before it says
its names – and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles – you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head –
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
– William Stafford
Special thanks to Kim Stafford for permission to include this poem, reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press.
William Stafford, one of the world’s most beloved poets, was born and raised in Kansas, starting his prolific poetic life in Hutchinson in 1914, and going on to receive his BA and MA from the University of Kansas. During the Second World War, Stafford was a conscientious objector and worked in the civilian public service camps-an experience he recorded in the prose memoir Down My Heart (1947). He married Dorothy Hope Frantz in 1944; they had four children, including writer Kim Stafford. Stafford taught at Lewis and Clark College from 1948 until 1980. His first major collection of poems, Traveling Through the Dark, won the National Book Award in 1963. He went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose. Among his many honors and awards were a Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. In 1970, he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position currently known as the Poet Laureate).
Please send your poem in a Rich Text Format document or as a Word document, to KSpoetlaureate@gmail.com by midnight on April 8.
Professional Poet Category Winner:
Centering the House
By Wyatt Townley, Shawnee Mission
All night Kansas
the lungs of the continent
takes a sip of the galaxy
swirling stars and barbed wire
sofabeds and willows
books and doors banging open
signs disappear whole towns
ditch themselves in the countryside
I stir the coffee to center the house
the place our mothers and fathers
and theirs and theirs passed through
their aprons strung on telephone wires
this tunnel of wind this trial
makes trees throw back their heads
and the hair along our arms stand up
we’re nothing but breath on its way through the woods
Wyatt Townley is a fourth-generation Kansan. Her work has appeared in journals ranging from The Paris Review to Newsweek. Books of poetry include The Breathing Field (Little, Brown), Perfectly Normal (The Smith), and her new collection, The Afterlives of Trees (Woodley), which she won a Master Fellowship from the Kansas Arts Commission to complete.
NonProfessional Poet Category Winner:
A Kansas Native Discusses the Natural Disasters
By Israel Wasserstein, Topeka
Raised in California, you freeze with each storm warning,
listen for the locomotive roar,
imagine the funnel cloud descending
dark against greenblack dusk.
Strange, I thought. You know
the earth can swallow cars, buildings,
that land can collapse to sea,
that the next Big One is inevitable.
Yet a twister might pass blocks away
and leave us unaware until sirens woke us.
But now I know: you are a child of the land.
Amidst its tremors you brace under doorframes
without fear. I was raised by sky,
its furies as much as its calms.
When the evening chills with the hammer of hail,
the air takes me breathless, tense, home.
Contest #2:
April 15: Snow and Ice
We’ve all experienced surprising or expected snow, ice and everything in between, and not always just in winter. Write about a time when cold weather or whatever falls from the sky in cold weather impacted life as you know it. For inspiration, here is Peter Wright’s poem, due to appear in 150 Kansas Poems on December 22:
winter solstice song
love can not cure loneliness
loneliness is love
all things sheathed in ice
a sough issues from each blade
aching to decide
absolute zero
one spark rings then another
autonomous joy
walking through winter
her emptiness emerges
to carry my heart
steel sky descending
engaged in stainless quiet
a kernel of love
woken by a flash
pre-dawn thunder & big snow
eerie new year’s eve
one one of one one
will i be alone this year
will i be all one
one one of one one
a bond to our calender
or to emptiness!
she was the archer
who struck my heart & quickened
grace to be reborn
who quickened grace in my heart
reborn in darkness
again we have died
& the secret arrows fly
etching this arcade
the sky is a tongue
a vulgate palimpsest wrought
anew by each choice
what have i written
the flotsam of long short days
shortly growing long
the milkyway smiles
you are your own galaxy
a kind glacial truth
charlie mingus plays
spurring the indifferent stars
to forbidden song
able to respond
he finds himself a star
in the winter sky
– Peter Wright
Peter Wright is a poet and writer who lives in Jefferson County.
Please send your poem in a Rich Text Format document or as a Word document, to KSpoetlaureate@gmail.com by midnight on April 15.
Professional Poet Category Winner:
Inside the Snow Globe
By Wyatt Townley, Shawnee Mission
At long last you are in
the blizzard behind glass,
this trail of flakes your cape
of disappearance.
Dogs romp on the path.
Skaters twirl on the lake.
Under the ice, life
swirls. The yellow chapel
is forever framed by evergreens
and at the end of the pathway
the scene starts over:
The skaters are still
turning, it is still snowing,
turning and snowing.
Moving from solid to scattered
effervescent to evanescent
takes a lifetime.
Everything is nothing
if you look long enough.
NonProfessional Poet Category Co-Winners:
Snowstorm
By Diane Wahto, Wichita
Two of the boys dead before they graduated
high school. One shot by a pumpkin farmer saving
his Halloween crop on a cold October night.
The other killed when his horse threw him.
This boy, more animal than child, came to school
with dirty-faced brothers and sisters
on days when it was too cold in the unheated house
they called home.
The year before, when the snowstorm hit,
the kids slewed their eyes to the schoolhouse windows,
said I needed to let school out before we were snowed in.
I, too focused on the lessons, told them to pay attention
and forget about an early release.
Then the parent showed up at the door and pointed to my VW bug,
almost buried in white. She took the kids, I plowed through
the blizzard-hidden road ten miles to our little house in town.
We didn’t leave for days except for my husband’s treks
to the grocery store through the snow tunnel in the street,
where he filled a backpack with staples to see us through the siege.
Now, the school sits empty. Country kids ride the school bus to town.
Two boys rode the arc of their lives into the white light of endless night.
Ice Storm
By William J. Karnowski, Wamego
old elm we named you the Sentinel Tree
high upon the Flint Hills peak
stood winter winds and summers bleak
that did not rip your branches free
there came last night an icy spit
that laid a burden too great to bear
of sculptured glass and crystal glare
and weighted you until you split
the coyote wails of your demise
by sorrow moon and faint starlight
his refuge friend in black of night
no longer there at this sunrise
my young father once sat in view
full of fire and fresh romance
and asked his bride to take a chance
on time and trees that shelter you
Contest #3:
April 22: Heat and Light
Surviving summer is Kansas makes us true Kansans, particularly when the temperature is up, the chiggers are out, and the cicadas are coming in loud waves of sound. Write about an experience with heat, humidity, hot wind or long days….and/or the critters that come. For inspiration, read Patricia Traxler’s poem, due to appear in 150 Kansas Poems on August 15.
Cicadas in August
Nights I lie down in this Kansas
farm town and allow a distant ocean
to swallow my dreams: running on
the boardwalk, Mission Beach, morning fog
burned off in midday sun, the honk and clatter
of humanity, a childhood fear of palm trees,
the stir and noise of family. Lately
I swallow regret the way I once drank love
That brought me here and fell away. I wade
and wallow in winter’s dark. Days, the sky looms
large and ineluctable and the land lies quiet, flat
beneath it, accepting everything. It seems that
on the plains people learn early on the rule
of inevitability. I still argue with the clouds.
And each day as I watch the snow deepen by degrees
around the house, I know it might take time for me.
This bed is such a winter, white on white, nothing
near on either side. A chill rides all my surfaces,
mere skin can’t shift beyond the reach of Kansas wind.
Sometimes I dream a blizzard that won’t stop, that
grows and swells and covers over brittle windows,
settles high. In this dream I run from room to room,
find every window blocked by smothering snow. And
in the lull that follows I go calm at last, settle in
Amid the simple choices. The Pacific ocean
recedes into memory, and in the dark my eyelids lock
beyond old visions. I lie down then, the hard white
windows standing guard, and sleep wrapped in cool sheets
of amnesia while winter’s hard fist opens
slowly in the earth, palm warming, long fingers
stirring dormant roots that waken to a new life
easily, easily as I never could by trying.
– Patricia Traxler
From Forbidden Words, copyright Patricia Traxler, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Mo.
Author of three poetry collections including Forbidden Words (Missouri), Traxler has published her poetry widely, including in The Nation, Ms. Magazine, Ploughshares, Agni, LA Times Literary Supplement, Slate, The Boston Review, and Best American Poetry. Awards include two Bunting Poetry Fellowships from Radcliffe, Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, and a Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod.
Please send your poem in a Rich Text Format document or as a Word document, to KSpoetlaureate@gmail.com by midnight on April 15.
Professional Poet Category Winner:
Driving the Heart
By William Sheldon, Hutchinson
Of this country
n a day too hot for winter
and too beautiful to die, I watch
geese string across our southern sky
while the radio spools news: new car
bombs, polar caps melting, and west,
snow breaks a little our state’s long drought.
Once a man told his story: why snakes
lack legs and why you and I
must someday die. But, he said,
until we do, we may sit at the head
of this crowded table.
Many carry that tale
to their hearts, a kind of carrion
they can eat, growing fat
but never full, hungering
for a thing they have forgotten.
Robins come early now, and geese
never leave. Our seasons milder,
we have become their south. Doves
winter in the trees behind our house.
Northward, bears swim
searching lost ice. We drive
a narrow road, leaving heavy tracks.
The clouds ride full to our west.
Let us hope for snow.
Other tales tell of naming, a duty
I have often taken to heart, learning
to call the hawks who ride
our rich winds Red Tail, Cooper’s,
Sharp Shinned, as if such things meant
anything. Proud I have been
to own those words.
A cardinal crosses our road,
his red a constant vaunting. The air
waves fill, our leaders’ voices loud,
telling us we have everything to fear
and nothing to fret.
Heavy wind blows up from the south,
and the car pulls toward the ditch
not wanting to be steered.
NonProfessional Poet Category Winner:
A Hayloft Belongs to Children
By Dan Pohl, Hutchinson
The mice, given gray color by their God
Slide unseen under scythed summer hay
Loose in the loft, two inches of tan straw
Dross from collected bales stored above
They steal the feed from two draft horses
Below that cool their coats from the middle
Of summer heat after they plowed their
Existence from the world of pre-seeded fields
They hide, when children, cousins who cling
To a smooth rope that hangs from an old
Hand-carved block and tackle, tarzan east then
West onto the mown stacks of fodder
Their constant motion under the ship keel of
Trusses create tables for tea, stadium seats to
Watch winning teams, and Tibetan mountains
To climb as the light moves to end the day
Contest #4
April 29: Blossom or Blue Sky
April is a season unto itself of blossom: daffodils, forsythia and in some corners of Kansas, even magnolia. And anytime around the year there will be bright, expansive blue skies. Write about blossom and/or blue skies, celebrating the moments when the weather astonishes us with ease and beauty. For inspiration, read Ramona McCallum’s poem, which appread in 150 Kansas Poems March 22.
Equinox
Winter is trying hard to get in a last word, but the calendar
is on my side. So let that gray bastard rant with blustering fists.
I drive home in silence. Grocery sacks spill across the back seat,
frozen vegetables in no danger of thawing in their bags.
Along the street, trees scratch at the sky with skeptical branches–
dates don’t make them forgive. They want to be seduced
by longer, warmer days before they’ll surrender
in succulent bud.
But daffodils present themselves right now, by the front door.
I bring them inside and bundle them into a vase.
Bright faces watch as I fix supper, elegant guests
join me tonight at my table.
– Ramona McCallum
Ramona McCallum earned her B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from Kansas State University in 1999. She currently lives in Garden City, Kansas with her husband Brian McCallum, a ceramic artist, and their 6 children. Ramona works as her husband’s editor and artist’s assistant, and she also teaches 7th grade English Communication and Poetry at a local middle school. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Organization and Environment and Zone 3.
Please send your poem in a Rich Text Format document or as a Word document, to KSpoetlaureate@gmail.com by midnight on April 29.
Professional Poet Category Winners:
Columbarium Garden
By Denise Low, Lawrence
Cold sun brings this mourning season to an end
one year since my mother’s death. Last winter thaw
my brother shoveled clay-dirt, she called it gumbo,
over powdery substance the crematorium sent us
not her, but fine, lightened granules—all else
rendered into invisible elements. That handful
from the pouch, un-boxed, was tucked into plotted soil,
the churchyard columbarium, under a brass plaque
and brick retaining wall, scant semblance of permanence.
Now my mother is a garden—lilies and chrysanthemums
feeding from that slight, dampened, decomposing ash.
Her voice stilled. One ruddy robin in the grass, dipping.
NonProfessional Poet Category Winners:
There! There!
By Nancy Hubble, Lawrence
First the early-morning
cup of coffee to my lips
while herons fly over
on their way to the Kaw
From the Haskell Bottoms,
wetlands only fourteen blocks
south of my fenced yard.
In silence, they glide above us.
Starlings whirring, hunker down
as if they saw hawks or hot air balloons.
So, picking up my brush to paint –
to make the circle of my day come
true – I think how pleasant is the town
that embraces these beautiful creatures.
Darkness comes again, shadows filling inside
Fences. Flowers lose colors as light puts itself to bed.
Once again the prayer of holding my evening glass.
Water tonight. Tomorrow some of the new wine.
Heat leaves the day and tomorrow
winter will want our attention.
But sometimes in the dark, just
as the end seems imminent,
geese sew the crest of the wind.
Sparks of dying light
reflect in the water.
We see it.
There!
There!
