We are very grateful to Barbara Loots, widely recognized poet, long-time friend and contributor to The Lyric, for her willingness to judge both the yearly awards and the quarterly award.   Retired from her various editorial positions with Hallmark Cards as of March 14th, she plans “to sit on a porch in a rocker and write lyric verse,” an option we heartily endorse!  The winners she chose are below:

Yearly Prize winners

Lyric Memorial Award, $100

DUTCH ELM

That trees would die
We knew.  The columns of the nave
Of Summit Avenue, the architrave
Of openwork where canopies unfold,
Green or briefly gold,
The arched, leaf-dripping limbs
Backlit with sky---

In every year, some go.
Some ends arrive with force:  the papers warn
With pictures, after every storm,
Of fallen branches, hollow at the heart,
Or great trunks snapped apart,
Battering cars and houses with the blows.
(We knew, but now we know.)

Some ends are quiet:  the red
Stripes appearing, like a garottting wound,
On trunks where the inspectors found
Beetles in bark, bare limbs lurking in shade.
The tree crew and the chainsaw blade
Will come—we know now—soon---
The stripe says, This is dead.

They make short work of things
With sweat and cherry-pickers, saws and zeal
Rope and rappelling acrobatic skill
And limb-shredding machines.
Only the stump remains
And is soon sawdust: nothing left to chance
But next year’s fairy rings.

No help for it, then.
This cut to sky, this coring of the heart.
These trees too far apart.
This just delivered balled-and-burlapped stick,
Its trunk two inches thick,
Decades from beauty.  What we always knew:
We start again.

Mary Ann Corbett

Leslie Mellichamp Award, $100

MESSAGES

I remember walking down the beach
deserted on that gray-etched, sultry day,
with lines of seaweed script strewn
casually among the punctuation of old shells.
Were they a message brought by courier waves,
the language of opaquely literate depths,
tidings from the mermaids of Atlantis?

And as I thought about those dripping voices,
pondering their indecipherable notes
in sand, I came upon an old lighthouse
roosting on a tiny spit of land,
a seagull on a post.  Deserted, too,
this day---and every day---its candle-power
snuffed, door locked, with walls paint-chipped and pale
as a drowned face.  No sound but nesting birds
which fluttered in and out of eyeless windows.

Once this building throbbed with light, which beat
like a heart in rhythm with the rhythms
of the sea, pulsing in a syntax
even the illiterate could read.
Sometimes, indeed, the signal came too late
and human shouts then blended in the murmur
of the deep, and in the ebb and sigh
of constant-speaking waves.

                        Now, of course,
the darkened lighthouse is a hieroglyph,
almost as meaningless as seaweed scrawl,
except it is a harbor for the gulls,
who shriek their daily stories to the sea,
while plovers scratch mute foot-notes on the shore.

Sandra Shaffer VanDoren

                               AND

CAMELLIAS GRIEVING
    …”the beauty was as tenacious as the grief…”
           from Georgia Bockover’s Far from Home

Oh, yes, they all have died,
the farmer, his old wife, their aging dog
whom they had buried under the camellias one July,
she snuffling
he shoveling
the friendly earth, so damp and ripe with life.

Their house the farmer built
so many springs ago for his young bride,
where she had planted the camellias by each windowsill
he hammering
dog, yammering,
hears just their sighs in rooms where once they’d dwelt.

Those empty rooms have sat
alone for years, first grieving in the rains
then weeping in the sun, their paint corroding bit by bit,
floors wobbling,
doors doddering,
and windows cracked by questing wind and wet.

Ivy, dense, has grown
on outside walls to hide their blank despair,
its fingers creeping to the ruined roof, caressing, down
flues, coddling,
pipes, cosseting,
a lover comforting the orphaned home.

Camellias stay in leaf,
magnolias too, which nestle near the door—
see, blossoms strew pell-mell across porch floor a bridal wreath,
buds gathering
love offering,
their beauty still tenacious as the grief.

Sandra Shaffer VanDoren

Roberts Memorial Prize, $100

MIDSUMMER EVE INSOMNIA

A sleepless heart and wandering mind could tell
By whisper, look, frisson, and careful word
What portent of night-blooming love befell
Enshrined in gardens lush with songs unheard.
Affection’s nothing but a whistling bird,
And lust a fine and brazen, bragging bell
That rings one note, with years a dimming knell,
At last to still, in creaking flesh immured—
Or not.  Some  fires there are will not be banked,
Some forces too great and large to be well thanked.
We only nod in faint acknowledgment,
Embarrassed we should be so heart-content.
The long day calls and begs for our embrace,
The world so sad and passionate a place.

Kathryn Hinds

New England Prize, $50

RASPBERRY PATCH

Stephen Scaer

Margaret Haley Carpenter Prize, $50

YEAR’S END

There comes a deeper silence when
the tattered, shattered leaves are shed,
and bleeding hearts lie down beside
the breathless roses in their bed.

The scent of woodsmoke fills the air,
the windows don a second pane,
and feathered finger waves of snow
replace the knuckled tap of rain.

There’s comfort in the solitude
when ice extinguishes the sun,
and winter’s soothing silver flute
has banished summer’s frantic drum.

And oh, the downy nest of night,
the silent stair, the golden glow,
as lamplight’s benediction spills
its blessing on the purple snow.

Arlette Lees Baker

Fluvanna Prize, $50

YOU CAN’T WRITE A POEM WITH MICROSOFT WORD

Did you ever try writing with Microsoft Word,
A poem, a form of which it’s never heard,
Resulting in question marks if the word “when”
Is used in beginning a sentence, and then
Letters that start a line not capitalized
And fragmented phrases remain ill-advised?

And grammar, where shall I list comments about
“Me and your” as a subject and commas tossed out,
Not using enjambment to finish a thought
And using some words that, by now, really ought
To be in Word’s purported large knowledge base?
I keep my old Webster’s nearby, just in case.

Charlene Fisk

Honorable Mention

Lionel Willis, for “Willow Catkins," Spring issue
Doris Watts, for “Crossing,” Winter issue
Susan McLean, for “Partnering,” Fall issue
Robert W. Crawford, for “Fair Trade,” Spring issue
Gail White, for “Love and Science,” Summer issue
Judith Barisonzi, for “Shards,” Fall issue.

Fall Quarterly Award

Solitaire
(Hotel Window, 1956, Edward Hopper)

She moves beside herself, another chair,
perhaps.  The window’s dark.  It’s almost cold
enough to translate rain, a thought she’ll fold
away for now.  Double solitaire.
The window misappropriates her starea
and twins it back, a metaphor she’ll hold
a moment, then let go.  Something’s sold
for everything that’s bought.  She has a flair
for careful bargaining.  Time reserves
itself for her: continuum, like rain,
or what is thin in rain that can’t be rhymed.
She buys her stare back from the glass, her nerves
A doublement.  Dichotomous again,
he moves, each motion dual, cautious, timed.

Carol Frith

                                AND

TAMARACK

It’s tomorrow and the light will not
recede.  The tamarack is learning how
to fade—its scaly needles yellow in
the heat.  There is no breeze to turn the sky

around.  The squat adobe house is not
as large as I remember.  Tell me how
the oleanders used to bloom, and in
the back, the trellis rose and ragged sky . . .

I recall that rose—a climber—not
at all well suited to the heat, but how
it bloomed in April, tiny blossoms in
a flood of sunlight.  That’s the way the sky

is blooming now:  unsteady light that’s not
so much about the loss of time as how
time’s passage is a kind of gift that’s in
and out of shadow, in and out of sky.

The light’s a cautious rapture.  I do not
believe in trellis roses.  Tell me how
the yellow tamarack unleaves, and in
that loss, opens up the yard to sky.

Carol Frith