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2025 Sam Ragan Awards Day – Students

Posted in poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 16, 2025| 4 Comments »

  . 
[5 poems by winners of NC Poetry Society student contests]
  . 
Fear
  . 
There I stood upon the water
Looking out to foreign lands
Separated by the oceans
I take a breath and clench my hands
I take a step and close my eyes
And jump across to the other side
I land in all the sandy rubble
And I looked back and saw a puddle!
  . 
Juliet Geracitano
5th grade, Audrey W. Garrett Elementary School, Mebane, NC
Third Place, Travis Tuck Jordan Award of NC Poetry Society
  . 
  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
  . 
It is impossible to convey the enthusiasm and joy that radiates from these students as they step up to the microphone to read their poems. Some of them have to climb a rostrum to be visible behind the lectern. Some of them have arrived cloaked in adulthood. All of them lean in, open to the page which holds their lines, and when they have finished, look up at us with a glorious victorious smile. And they see us smiling right back as we applaud.
  . 
Each year the North Carolina Poetry Society sponsors five different contests open to students stratified by grade level, from 3rd grade through college undergraduates. Winning poems are published in the annual anthology Pinesong, and each May the Society holds Sam Ragan Awards Day at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities to give these winning poems voice. The poems reprinted here are a small sampling of those read by their winning authors on May 10, 2025. Contact this site (comments@griffinpoetry.com) if you would like to purchase Pinesong, which also includes the winners of the eleven adult contests
  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
  . 
The Reservoir
  . 
The sky has emptied itself, curving in cloudy
porcelain over the few dwellers, here,
trembling
and the small pieces of bare water
settle beneath.
  . 
Beside the bridge to Highway 73
(we’ve driven by it every week this November)
a heron bends double
  . 
with the draggled trees, ribs of logs soft with rot,
over everything the film of silk like
skin, exposed.
  . 
The reeds
and the heron’s feathers
and what’s left of the water
flutter with the dark wind.
  . 
The sky cannot protect them from this –
a huddling in the newly foreign crevices beneath
the upturned bowl.
  . 
Sometimes I think that the world pours out
all that it has – all of itself – on us
and still it is not enough.
  . 
Lillian Skolrood
9th grade, Sparrow Academy, Cornelius, NC
Third Place, Joan Scott Environment Award of NC Poetry Society
  . 
  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
  . 
Pat Riviere-Seel served as this year’s judge of the Sherry Pruitt Award for students in grades 10 through 12. Besides her own numerous publications and writing awards, Pat has been a forceful and relentless supporter of the literary arts for decades. She offered this challenge to these students and to all of us:
  . 
I’m wearing several hats today, but the most important one is the one as your cheerleader. As I read the more than one hundred poems in the high school student contest, I realized just how fortunate we are in this state, in this country, to have a new generation of poets who use their poems to tell their truth, to shine a light on what is often a dark and disturbing time. Some of the poems were overtly political; others were intensely personal. All contained important truths and are necessary.
  . 
At this time in our country when the arts are under attack, when books are being banned, and our nation’s history and culture are being perverted by a political agenda of hate, please know this: Your words matter. Your poems matter. You are not alone. For every poem that you write, know there are at least a dozen more people who will find themselves in your words-their joys, their sorrows, their fears, their hopes and dreams. You-each one of you-are the only one who can write your poems. If you do not write them, no one will. And that would be a big loss.
  . 
The politicians and the performers will not save us. They may have political power at the moment, but words-your words-also have power. And that power-unlike political power-is lasting.
  . 
Poetry cleanses.  Poetry gives us back our soul, both individually and collectively. Keep writing. Be fearless. Do not ever let anyone censor or silence you.
– Pat Riviere-Seel
  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
  . 
Fly Me to the Moon
  . 
There’s war in Ukraine, chaos in Gaza,
while I sit at the piano, looking at the keys.
  . 
It’s just practice, nothing to worry about, but
my eyes start to burn. I think of leaving, not
  . 
coming back. I look at the pages and look
at the teacher, ready to move on. I try
  . 
to sight read but can’t shape my hands
fast enough, left in the notes and chords.
  . 
The tempo is too fast, the piece once sung
by Sinatra. No tears come as I find the notes.
  . 
In another sky, I know there are missiles,
to destroy concert halls and opera houses.
  . 
After, I walk through a desert into the dark
abyss, shot by starlight, to a melancholy song.
  . 
Vicky Teng
10th grade, Marvin Ridge High School, Waxhaw, NC
Third Place, Sherry Pruitt Award of the NC Poetry Society
  . 
  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
  . 
I Would Bleed
  . 
I want to be a wild thing
And soar high on feathered wings
I want to scar the dirt with heavy claws
And watch a vulture feed
  . 
I want to be untamable
And bite the hand that feeds
I want to escape this poison air
And I want to scream
  . 
I want to be the loudest beast
And roar louder than a waterfall sings
I want to stomp and dance without rhythm
And I want to breathe
  . 
I will be a guardian
And keep the tall grass green
I want to see the stars again
And for that I would bleed
  . 
Sam Kawalec
10th grade, R. J. Reynolds High School, Winston-Salem, NC
Honorable Mention, Sherry Pruitt Award of the NC Poetry Society
  . 
  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
  . 
Pelmeni / Russian Dumpling
  . 
It is New Year’s Eve, and I am making pelmeni and thinking only of you.
Russian dumplings, I used to watch my mother fold them; delicately and properly.
She never let me do it.
I fold the flour into the dough, and it swirls in a cloud, landing on my shirt.
I am nineteen, but with this powdered coating, I am seven, and ten, and twelve again.
  . 
How do I love you?
I never learned it. It was not something I could watch my mother do.
I did not watch her and know how to touch. How to hold your hand, to grab you and say
I love I love you I love you; can you feel it?
  . 
I blunder through, an attempt to be gentle, but I am butchering it.
The meat is falling out of the dough, red against white. Flesh-like.
Is this what my heart looks like to you? Exposed, Unnatural?
My mother said if I don’t pinch the corners hard enough the entire pelmen will explode.
Let me patch it back up. Let me hide it away.
  . 
I place the finished ones onto a plate. They sit with a resoluteness that seems final.
‘Yes, here is my place on this plate.’
Oh, little dumpling, if you only knew the boiling pot that waits to greet you!
You will hiss as you enter and sink silently to the very bottom.
  . 
I plop the dumpling in, and a droplet of boiling water flies out and lands on my arm.
I jerk it away, instinctual.
How do the pelmeni do it? Hiss, and die, and resurface?
How much bravery in one small pocket?
  . 
I do not know how to ask for you.
I sit, pelmen-like, waiting for you to read my thoughts.
Waiting for you to understand the extent of my want.
How deep is it buried? At the very bottom of the pot?
  . 
Masha Dixon
Sophomore, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Second Place, Undergraduate Award of the NC Poetry Society
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  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
  . 
The Student Contests of the North Carolina Poetry Society open for submissions each year on November 1, with a deadline of January 31. Check HERE for guidelines and details.
Travis Tuck Jordan Award for students in Grades 3 – 5.
Endowed by Dorothy and Oscar Pederson
Joan Scott Memorial Award for poems about the environment, students in Grades 5 – 9.
Endowed by contributions in memory of Joan Scott and by the Board of the NC Poetry Society.
Mary Chilton Award for students in Grades 6 – 9.
Sponsored by Tori Reynolds
Sherry Pruitt Award for students in Grades 10 – 12
Endowed by Gail Peck
Undergraduate Award for students attending a North Carolina college or university or whose parents or guardians live in the state of North Carolina .
Endowed by the Judith C. Beale Bequest
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Cut Flowers

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 21, 2025| 4 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Gail Peck]
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Prayer
 . 
Please let me see
 . 
the cow’s big eyes
the goldenrod
 . 
the coffee in my cup
turning color with cream
 . 
all that painters have made
stone sculpture in a field
 . 
family photographs
old letters
 . 
poems and stories
that funny looking bug
 . 
I can’t catch
how to read the clouds
 . 
if there’s a bee in the flower
I lean to
 . 
color of fruit
sheen of silk
 . 
what time it is
my bright painted toes
 . 
label on the wine bottle
I like to study
 . 
how full to pour my glass
word and words and words
 . 
and faces of those I love
yes   mostly those
 . 
Gail Peck
from In the Shadow of Beauty, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ — Henry David Thoreau
 . 
Toward the end I took over the ritual, but when had it begun? I had never paid much attention to the cut flowers in the vase on the dining room table until I became complicit in their procurement. When Dad relinquished driving . . . correction, when we made Dad give up driving at age 96, it fell to one of us to take him to Trader Joe’s every week for flowers. Mom came along with us as long as she was physically able – was she choosing the flowers she liked or the ones Dad wanted her to choose?
 . 
When it became too much to shepherd two elders on walkers and still push a shopping cart, it became just Dad doing the choosing. Same variety every week, pink or mauve Alstroemeria, Peruvian Lily – I truly think Mom would have been equally happy with anything from TJ’s lush bank of bouquets, but these in particular held their petals longer, according to Dad. Most blooms would last until next week’s shopping, and even then Dad would order us to separate out any stems that still seemed fresh. Thrifty. A good provider. The manager in charge. My Dad. The flowers were one last affirmation of his life-long identity.
 . 
What do we see when we look at another person’s life? We are adrift in the ocean of “Why did she do that?” and “Why does he act that way?” Rocked by chop and foam, no safe or simple way to dive deep, a fathomless conversation. We observe from arm’s length how the one we love reacts, their judgements and choices, but the water is opaque; what impulse impels the rudder? Did Dad keep flowers on the table to make Mom happy, or did he do it to feel happy about being seen to be making Mom happy?
 . 
During the last months Mom lived I brought her flowers from my own gardens. First Lenten Rose (Hellebore) and Redbud branches, then Daffodils and Narcissus that kept blooming for a solid month. As the weather warmed I shared Beebalm and Anise Hyssop my son-in-law had started for me in his greenhouse, then the cavalcade of Asters, Black-Eyed Susans giving way to Marigolds and Zinnias, the first year I’d planted such. I think I brought them every week to make Mom happy, a last chance for a final gift just from me. But I think I was also incredulous that my lackadaisical gardening could produce such bounty – I was showing off.
 . 
I would place a few long stems in a fluted vase on the tiny kitchen table where Mom read the comics each morning; another small vase beside her accustomed seat on the couch; finally all vases came to rest beside her bed where she spent most of her final weeks. It never failed. She would, with effort, turn her head and spy my offering. Then she would look at me and smile.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Leaving
 . 
Once you are left
you are always left
a clock ticking backwards
 . 
You tried to crawl out the window
when your father packed his suitcase
and were pulled back
You opened the door
and ran after the car until breathless
 . 
Why does the sound of a train whistle
not make you sad when one
took your mother away for months
 . 
Perhaps because your grandmother
played The Lonesome Railroad Blues
on her harmonica and the dog danced
 . 
The calendar nailed to the wall
turned one month over another
until winter was gone
 . 
Daffodils bloomed    the dogwood
reopened Christ’s wounds
 . 
Curious girl who gathered flowers
from fields and pulled petals
from daisies – he loves me, he . . .
 . 
Gail Peck
from In the Shadow of Beauty, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Your family, like mine, has stories you break out at every gathering, dust off, polish up, and share good as new. I’m sure Dad is glad we finally quit telling the one about him breaking a full bottle of ketchup at the diner in Parkersburg, West Virginia when we were teenagers. Then again there are probably any number of stories that deserve more retellings than they get. Stories make us a family. What will happen to the stories that no one keeps alive?
 . 
Gail Peck’s In the Shadow of Beauty tells stories that make a family. The stories are cut flowers and lace, and they are rancid wounds and meanness. The people we want to love can hurt us the most. The people we want to hold onto forever will all leave us in time. We seek meaning by revisiting and reliving the turning points as well as the ho-hum trivial passages that have somehow hooked themselves into our memory. For most people, we will never truly grasp their intent or purpose, but when we’re brave enough to re-experience how they have affected us, we might discover our own purpose.
 . 
Gail often uses photographs of her family, which capture a single moment without judgement or commentary, to rekindle events to which she then applies the art of poetic commentary and judgement. This book is their lives as well as hers. At one point Gail admits she does not know where the ashes of her sister are scattered but she still wants hers to mingle with them. She reveals her bonds with her mother as a many-faceted jewel, some faces bright crystal but others tarnished. And Gail inspires me to keep visiting, keep remembering, keep looking and never be satisfied that I have seen all there is to see in my own stories and my family’s. As she confesses in Arranging Flowers:
I can’t cut a flower without thinking of her,
and I may go again to place some
on her grave, but I’ll have no desire
to continue. Once you sever the stems
you know to make the most of it,
and isn’t that why we love them,
their beauty, the petals that will fall.
 . 
❦
 . 
In the Shadow of Beauty, poems by Gail Peck, is available from Finishing Line Press HERE
Enjoy poems from an earlier book by Gail Peck, The Braided Light, at last week’s issue of VERSE & IMAGE
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Past Tense
 . 
How quickly it passes
from is to was
 . 
from has to had –
as quick as a bird
 . 
flies from a windowsill –
you hear its song
 . 
but no longer see it.
They’d slit her gown
 . 
up the back
to spread beneath her.
 . 
Small, embroidered roses
at the top with beads
 . 
in each center.
The eyes don’t totally close
 . 
near the end
and once the hands cooled
 . 
we knew
and I know almost no Bible verses
 . 
but it came to me
when they removed the body
And the peace of God, which surpasses
all understanding
 . 
for she was a godly woman,
my mother.
 . 
Dress her in pink
with the white lace blouse
 . 
for she loved white –
white of the lily, white of the clouds.
 . 
Gail Peck
from In the Shadow of Beauty, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-03-07

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That Isn’t Me

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 6, 2024| 7 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Cheryl Wilder]
 . 
Anything That Happens
 . 
Until I was twenty, I believed anything
wouldn’t happen to me.
 . 
Walking from the car,
leaving you behind,
 . 
sirens whining louder as they closed on us;
I didn’t understand anything
 . 
had just happened.
People said it wasn’t my fault
 . 
and for reassurance,
It could have been me. But
 . 
I heard what they didn’t say.
I’m so glad it wasn’t.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
It’s 1990 and my kids are cruising toward teenagerdom. Every week in the throw-away medical journals that cross my desk there’s at least one article with a title like We Never Even Suspected, or Why Me? The doctor or doctor’s spouse laments about their teen who is (pick one): flunking out of college; a closet alcoholic; pregnant out of wedlock; addicted to Percocet. That becomes the one article I am compelled to read before assigning the journal to the round file. It’s a solid principal of statistics: if it happened to them it’s that much less likely to happen to me.
 . 
Because today in 1990 my kids are, well, not perfect but above average. They are so good. And I am so good. Whatever that other doctor did to cause his child to go wrong, I would never do that. Because somehow at this interchange along the cosmic highway I am totally in charge of (and totally to blame for) all the choices my kids are making and will make.
 . 
And responsible, of course, for all the rest, now and forever after. Are my parents happy? Is my wife fulfilled? Are my grandkids smart? Is there crabgrass in the flower bed? (Well, maybe I am responsible for that one.) Don’t worry, I am not poised here to write an article titled Everything That Would Have Been Better if I Were Better. That’s between me and 4 AM.
 . 
Instead, I’m attempting a more compelling practice. A practice without textbooks or certification exams. One that requires nothing but offers everything. A practice never free from pain but sometimes tinged with joy. All that this practice endeavors is to prod a slight change in phraseology, poke a minor shift in frame of reference. When I learn of your misfortune, when you tell me about your pain, when I recognize that you are suffering, I will try my best not to say to myself I’m glad that isn’t me, and instead I will say, That is me.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Xing
 . 
I don’t know how I brought a child
into the world when I can’t reconcile
 . 
if crashing a car and a friend’s skull
is karmic debt created
 . 
or payment for a past immoral act.
I open doors and say thank you and do not try
 . 
to behave in a way I cannot afford.
There’s no barometer, no way to know
 . 
if the pendulum is swinging
away or toward, how many pay-it-forwards it takes
 . 
before I break even at the gambling table.
I cold blend in with the pure
 . 
if it weren’t for the scars that don’t fade
no matter how many turtles I save,
 . 
so am I all that surprised
when my little boy tells me
 . 
of his palpable fear
to cross the street.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Sostenuto – a musical notation indicating a passage sustained to the utmost. Unrelenting. Imagine a violin’s piercing note, almost impossibly high and rising, horsehair glissando across the E-string. Now it’s joined in harmony by the A-string, discordant, the two dancing and warring with each other. They weave pitch and volume but never rest, sostenuto. You lean forward on the edge of your hard seat, your teeth are on edge, you want, you need, you crave desperately some resolution.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder sustains tension throughout sixty-four pages to the ultimate climax of Anything That Happens. Her story is too piercing: one tastes blood and tears. She lives every moment with that high, sharp note, days and years of guilt and pain – she has irretrievably damaged her friend – and then also weaves discordant disharmonies from her cold relationship with her mother and her non-relationship with her father. More than once I had to lay the book aside and breathe deeply to slow my pounding heart.
 . 
And more than once I resisted the urge to flip pages to the end. Who doesn’t crave resolution? What follows in this post today is the book’s penultimate poem. Some hurt can never be removed. No one can return to the moment before anything happens. Scars are just that, permanent marks and reminders of pain. How do any of us go on living? How? I invite you to enter the music of this book, its atonality and discord, one poem after another, until you reach its final page.
 . 
❦
 . 
Anything That Happens by Cheryl Wilder is a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection and is available at Press 53. Among other awards, the book was a finalist for the 2022 Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society; read an additional poem from the collection and celebrate 90 years of NCPS HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Home Safe
 . 
Friends visit the hospital
where I am not wanted. It’s just as well
 . 
that I stay in bed, carve poplar
into a shield I can place between
 . 
myself and others, learn you wake
from a coma by the drop
 . 
of my manslaughter charge. Years pass
before I hear your voice again,
 . 
asking me to lunch over the phone, your mother
telling me I am only allowed in her home
 . 
because you found my number
on your own. You reach for my arm
 . 
to steady your walk, lean close
to see me in focus, your smile wide
 . 
on one side of your face, brightened even more
at the restaurant when you flirt with the waiter.
 . 
That is enough, to see a glimpse of the friend
I once knew, but then you reach cross the table
 . 
for my hands, look at me to say
what you defied your mother to say,
 . 
It’s not your fault. Over and again,
I forgive you. You can’t remember
 . 
the night I cannot forget, but you know
your words are my salvation.
 . 
There is no talk of next time.
You get out of the car and walk
 . 
into the house, back to your mother
who can breathe once again.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2017-03-06a
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