Winning Poems: The Moods of Summer

The following poems won the annual poetry contest sponsored by the Summer School. The winners were selected from 60 entrants who submitted more than 300 poems. Judges this year were Walter Clark, Denis Donoghue, and James K. Robinson.

First Prize Parker W. Swanson

Charles River Herons

There are we who watch

The shallow edges, the long grasses, we who walk

The river edges in cool summer evenings.

Insects and small fish we call and collect

Among the city's slime, washed over our river edges,

Patiently watching polluted water washing our river's margins,

Our shallow edges, our long grasses.

God's Creatures

It was easy, under light boughs

And green of summer evenings,

The innocent grasses laughing, for you

To break and yield up from a rabbit

Its new life; in ideal garden,

Animal's mind, no evil waits

For happenings among the poppies.

Men's knowledge

That death's no incident

God's creatures never knew,

Nor fact in weedier gardens felt

That men, somehow as lesser creatures,

Seems must create

The power to hate.

Poem

That day, when quietness found me, I was walking

Through the locust-grove, inspecting spiny trunks to cut for fenceposts, the snow

Three days fallen and not melted, far from any farmhouse; the rhythm

Of bare grove without motion, and the sun hidden.

I stopped for stillness of centuries;

I found the look of the mountain there found by men times before and long ago,

The cold absence of odor from smoke overhill,

Desire like locusts' desire silently to stand.

Natural Things Shall Be Symbols

Natural things shall be symbols:

The park symbol of walkers in the park,

Four maples symbol of boys' playing in the maples,

Sunset on sumac tree all ecstatic beings.

In the little muddy ball lot

Among other children a one-eyed child is playing, the fastest runner;

The early-shook elm leaves and grassy soccer fields wait to receive all children;

Worn trees early-colored, the park's borders enhance airplanes, enhance trolleycars.

I was like dogs running through the park;

I watched the strollers; I was tag-games in the park,

I playing and watching was like scattered leaves.

Second Prize Kay C. Willke

Autumn

To halt the maple in her red moment,

The dried leaves at my feet still curled like pods,

To stay the curve of sparrows leaning south

And hold the image far behind my eyes

Is all of autumn's transient desire.

I hold a leaf like water paints run wild--

Vein to vein changing, running into gold,

The edge turned up to keep the color in.

The frost wind turns it brittle on my palm.

Never the same, my love, the running vein,

Never identical the leaf or yet the fall,

Never the moment realized as full

But that it stiffens in the sense's grasp

And fragments in the downwind of our days.

Caesar

Crimson composure on a silken couch,

Arrange the ambition massing in your mind;

The gradual thunder of your eagle spread

Will break the boundaries of the resting world--

So unsuspected is an ordered rage.

Third Prize Eugene E. Grollmess, S.J.

Tony

Tony kicks the porch railing with his

Other foot because it makes less

Noise. The right one fell off

Somewhere on Heartbreak Ridge; Tony couldn't

Remember when or how. But the doctors

All said, "Shrapnel," so Tony says

Shrapnel though he is more inclined to

Believe machine-gun.

"Ellie won't want him with a wooden

Foot," he could hear neighbors talking

Five-thousand miles from Allentown bedfast on a

Rolling hospital-ship called Mercy. But

No one guessed what Tony's feverish mind

Remembered. Ellie's letters had stopped coming

Already at Ft. Wood, as soon as

Tony learned

How to kill with his bare hands

In less than two seconds. "It's

Easy to break a man's neck if

You know how," he wrote. Ellie

Scribbled, "You'll never forget," and sealed the

Envelope. Tony framed the letter, kept writing.

"It's better than cigarettes," he wrote

Once in

Korea. Home with the wooden limb the

Neighbors know stands between him and

Ellie, Tony tells them, "Maybe I'll sprout

Another foot." Then, as if to

Stimulate growth, even at night, he stomps . . .

Stomps . . . stomps his porch like a

Frantic old pirate trying to forget how

To steal.

Randy Mead

There was a train of dust up the

Lane behind the tractor that

He was belting home like

A racehorse down the stretch. He cut the

Engine before the tractor was

All the way into the

Barn, hopped into the oil-soaked dust, and ran

Towards the house taking his

Shirt off on the way.

He simply said "No" to his mother's call

Of "Supper?" and hurried into

A tub of hot water

She had waiting for him. Pa was already

Upstairs snoring, so there would

Be no trouble getting the

Car--there is always question of that when

Pa is awake, because sometimes

Randy comes home unbelievably drunk.

Fourth Prize Susan B. Schwartz

On Painting of Ancient China

Noble scholar beneath a willow

And journey of the emperor through a mountain

In the dusk of summer

The emperor and his microscopic train

His ruinous mystique of gorgeous silk

Of trappings set with ivory

Are lost in the ascending crags

Haunted by blue and grey and ashen yellow

Ocean of clouds.

An old man traverses his fragile bridge of bamboo

Placid above the twisting rapids

Twisting river charged down from the arms of a noble mountain!

The old man slowly ascends

Flaying his humble donkey before him.

The magpies dart their quicksilvered tongues

At a sleepy old hare

And wild geese shiver in the moonlight.

The emperor's children dream in a garden

The fisherman rises to watch his sea

Glitter in the first sun

A fisherman breaks with the small prow of his boat

The last ice of winter.

The quiet leaves of autumn rustle about the heart.

Noble scholar beneath a willow.

Honorable Mention John Paden

On Our Last Remeeting

Your front tire was flat as a nail-head,

so you walked

your "All-Steel" bike between us

as we talked

ourselves onto the left bank of the Charles,

threading the homeward traffic as it flashed

subliminal advertisements of motion

of the dented ego that it passed.

Your spokes spun chromium pipedreams in the sun.

My head was spinning. Four months before,

I barged into your parents' store

of privateered Heppelwhite and pewter,

a free-wheeling pirate in a hoard of plunder,

and commandeered your mother when I hit

the never-before-guessed age of the wallpaper.

Even if I tried, I couldn't miss

the cracks on the tennis court:

your poise was shattered and you gawked

after the perverse ball--

starkly aboriginal in your cloroxed suit.

You did a spring-rite on your father's lawn

(it wasn't a lawn at all, but a hybrid

of a pool table and a football field).

At dinner, new-born from the shower in evening dress,

I hungered for you across a tablepiece of peonies,

a sun-baked lobster stretching my pegged claws.

In a teal sheathe, you were the proudest

of your father's prize peonies.

Cryptic, idle, he'd quadrupled your mother's ancestral fortune,

investing it all in IBM. Now

he had three gardeners to help him tend his beauties.

I gathered all my powers

to periphrase my ignorance of flowers.

Our conversation was unreal

Tulips turned to plastic on my tongue.

When you took off for Paris

the propellors seemed to go backwards.

Like an unleashed top I foundered

in drawn-out entropy, unstable, grounded.

Paris changed you more than you changed Paris.

You came home the portrait of a lady,

dropping names of galleries, trite

mementoes, in your train,

forcing me to see you in the new light

of your mother, beaming forth delight.

As we walk by the river

my mind balks.

I have nothing ready, I see no way back.

A scull, buoyant as flotsam, lunges

forward in rhythmic spasms.

At each stroke, Time, the relentless oarsmen, plunges

two different oars into a different stream.