----------2019 Robert Frost Poetry Contest Results-------
First Prize:
"Caterpillar" Author: Arne Weingart , Chicago Ill.
Runners-up:
"I Plan On Haunting" Author: Lucy Ricciardi , Greenwich CT
"Wild Man" Author: Arne Weingart , Chicago Ill
"Loner" Author: Michael Poluzzi, Highland NY
"Full Glow" Author: Linda Flaherty Haltmaier, Andover MA
"Late Harvest" Author: Toni Treadway, Rowley MA
"The Big Room" Author: Mark Bohrer, North Andover MA
"Letter to Hayden:
In the Afterlife" Author: George Drew, Poestenkill NY
"The Suicide Returns
To Leave A Note" Author: Arne Weingart , Chicago Ill
"Uncle Eli" Author: Blanche Jenkins, Detroit MI
You may notice that the same author can appear multiple times.
The scoring is blind and is based on each poem, not the poet.
Thanks to all submitters and readers!
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---Arne Weingart
I send you this photograph of a caterpillar
from Virginia. He, or she – how would I ever know? –
is impossibly fuzzy, perhaps a sign of harsher
than normal winter lurking in the hills
where they ride horses and hunt deer.
The caterpillar has not yet found out that they
are shooting Jews in Pittsburgh, right in the middle
of Saturday morning services. They will not
have had the chance to put the Torah away
yet, to wrap it up like a perpetually well-behaved
baby and sing it back to sleep in its velvet-lined ark,
or to hear a sermon on how to heal the world,
much less to say a prayer for the anniversaries
of the deaths of all their dead relatives. They
won’t be getting around to that this morning
in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,
where Jews go to remind themselves that whatever
happened once can and will happen again
and where, if it were an actual tree, caterpillars
will emerge in the spring, dangling from newly
green leaves, preparing themselves as best
they can remember how to become something
that sheds history like a sad old coat and takes flight.
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I plan on haunting
---Lucy Ricciardi
I plan on haunting this house
some time soon or in a few years,
not to be possessive, or to scare
the grandchildren or to settle
scores, and not to make a big deal
of it, but to complete my to do list
in post death thoughts about how
today there was a sound in the house
that wanders like a lost bird. Or
like the rainwater talking garbled
words and swallowing itself.
The new owners will say it’s the wind
in the two pipes set up on our roof
funneling runoff from the chimney
flashing to the gutters, to collect the
efflorescence that would otherwise
stain the shingles, but I will be the wind
in the pipe and the voices in the faucet
and the stubborn film on the roof.
Tell me you don’t hear your mother’s
voice murmelling softly. Of course this
is just a lullaby I’m singing to myself,
assaulted not by the traffic, but the
silence of the suburbs on a Sunday night.
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The Big Room
Or an evening walk in the rhyming universe
-----Mark Bohrer
The evening sky brightens outside, and draws light from my room.
The dogs, impatient at my feet, want to move, let’s leave this tomb.
I laugh, is the workday through? Their leashes on, and mine, undone,
we step into the outer room, now the realm of the setting sun.
It’s eventide, half summer, as we step into the gloaming,
into that room with no ceiling, the three of us go roaming.
Into the warm quiet nightfall, we enter this swirling place.
Leaving our home, my dogs take me on a trip through time and space.
The fading light is stealing, background radiation, fleeing,
new stars and planets are appearing, pearls in a pink champagne sea.
As the swirling sky darkens, what’s left still ignites my brain.
It leaves me with this feeling, our familiar world is strange.
It looks as if I’m standing on the edge of an open field.
It looks like a man with two dogs – instead the infinite, revealed.
I feel the arrow of time, the sky aquiver with twilight.
My hand draws the bow of the Archer, his dart flies across the night.
In this room, my hand can reach to the edge of space and beyond.
From me to that star, I could skip a stone across this pond.
Can my spirit bear the lightness of The All within my reach?
Yet here I am, in the big room, dizzy, with dogs at my feet.
Overhead, there to the right, shines Vega, Mister Sagan’s star.
He had a billion or two to share, but this one was the door.
Twenty-five light years, a short step away, Contact was the book,
where Ms. Foster met her Dad, or an alien with a kindly look.
How can all this be so welcoming? It could squash me like a bug.
But it doesn’t seem so inclined – somehow it feels more like a hug.
A hadron glow still warms the sky, and the worlds around each star.
The radiation might be dangerous, but still, it warms my heart.
Summer solstice, North Andover, Mass.
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---Arne Weingart
“New video footage from a drone shows the first
images of members of an isolated Amazon tribe
that had no known contact with the outside world,
the Brazilian government said this week.”
-- The New York Times, August 23, 2018
We see him from above at some distance
moving through a clearing carrying
what appears to be a spear, we’re not sure.
Although the drone cannot have been
completely silent he does not look up
but moves normally as if this, too, were normal.
The drone is not allowed to fly lower
or worse, to follow, which would break the rule
we all now understand, which is that we
are contagious, that we are a disease
he and all his tribe will never recover from.
First will come canned goods, then medicine,
a motor for the back of his canoe,
then dresses, shoes and trousers, alcohol,
and the worst pathogen, a new alphabet
whereby his language will be parsed into
mere linguistics. Walking there below,
carrying what appears to be a spear,
his life completely strung on sight and sound
as though on wire that reaches back centuries,
I don’t believe he hasn’t seen or heard us.
I think he has a word for what we are,
another word for what he now must do.
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The Suicide Returns to Leave a Note
---Arne Weingart
This is for your benefit, not mine.
Although I can see how you might think
I felt I left something unsaid at the end.
But no. I said what I could say while I
was still alive. There are some who wonder,
maybe you’re one, whether I have regrets,
whether, in those first few feet of fall, I had
second thoughts. I prefer to no longer speak
in metaphors. Nothing is like anything else
anymore. There was a railing, an edge,
a leap, a drop, water hard as concrete, final
consequences. Life, I came to understand,
is binary, not some accumulation
of missed opportunities and best
intentions, but a switch marked On or Off.
I chose Off, never having fully understood
the On position. Now I know everything
and nothing, which is what all the great mystics
used to brag about. I guess some still do,
to ever smaller audiences. Still,
I don’t blame you for wanting to know what
might lie beyond or even in plain sight.
The answer, if I could give you one, which
I can’t, might not even apply because
your afterward might be different from mine,
not having exited by the same door.
All I can tell you, which is still not much,
is that we try to let bygones be bygones.
Think of it like a club where it’s considered
poor form to bring up bad luck or old money –
another metaphor – you’ll have to pardon me
the way I pardoned you, not that you were
ever guilty of anything other than
wanting to go on living.
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