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Welcome to Estate 505 in
ARTELLA'S POETRY GARDENS OF FAME!




Click the links below to read the winning poems for the contest ending May, 2005.

You'll also see photos of the top three winners, and read their biographical sketches.

Poetry Gardens of Fame Index

First Place
Second Place
Third Place
Honorable Mentions





FIRST PLACE WINNER


Megan Thompson

Megan Thompson is an educator in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Previously, her work has been published in The American Bahá’í and The Apostrophe, a peer edited journal out of Saint Francis University. Megan is an active member of the Bahá’í faith and views poetry as one of many ways to express her spirituality and worship the Creator.


Foreclosure

It echoed like a haunted cave
after all the second hand hand-me-downs were out,
waiting in the truck,
squatting in the dark.
Silent, indifferent orphans.

We left the closets full,
the carpet dirty.

It was a desperate escape.

The things we abandoned weighed against the future
in the cost ratio analysis of the deeply disappointed.
Jobless but not yet hopeless.

And, triumphantly, in love.

"Other couples would have broken up…"
We said.
Dashed against the rocks with the shore in plain sight,
as the shipwrecked often are.

"Well, that’s it…"

We sighed.
Or the house sighed.

In a gesture of no hard feelings, I grabbed my last bottle of schnapps
and poured it in the sink.

Beautiful aerosol halo--
peach and pleasant memories.

Glimmering for a moment
then falling from grace to the countertop,
where each sweet molecule evaporated,
a faint, sugary crust for someone else to wipe clean.

Still, I felt a little smaller walking away.

As first place winner in the Poetic Idol Competition, Megan won a prize package that includes a $150.00 cash prize; an e-Chapook of her poetry (up to 20 poems), attractively created and published for her personal or commercial use; public status as Artella's Poetic Idol in Residence; a feature interview in an issue of e-Artella; guaranteed publication in an e-Artella issue; free enrollment in her choice of Artella e-courses, the Artella eBook, "Behind the Veil", her choice of any e-Artella issue, and one month FREE Artella membership. Click here for contest details.

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SECOND PLACE WINNER



Dawn Richerson

Dawn Richerson is on a personal quest to cultivate a life of art, healing and faith. She is a painter, poet and published author who is fascinated with the topics of nature, spirituality and creativity, and dreams of traveling around the world one day. Dawn enjoys helping other creative professionals launch their own creative revolutions through the marketing communications company she founded in 1997. She lives in Atlanta with one son, two dogs and a cat.

The Suicidal Birds Make Their Way to Me

From straight ahead and only slightly
to the left, he comes barreling toward the glass.
I slow too late, and the devil dressed in blue
becomes a blur with piercing yellow eyes who
falls to pieces in feathers floating high that,
of course, remind me of what it is to still
love you.

The suicidal birds make their way to me –
law of attraction I'm certain you would say.

But I want to live and have just come
from fighting my war with a world that would keep
me caged and gouge my sight with admonitions
to not make a peep, to stay to pre-ordained
flight patterns, to let them clip my wings and, most
of all, to forget I ever flew anywhere
with you.

The birds; they all are flying north by northwest.
I do my best to catch the wind, to follow.

Tonight, I act on impulse as I
see my own shadow in the glassy mirror
and lunge forward, seeing shattered glass and you
when neither are really there. I do not know
which way is home again. My feathers plucked,
my spirit with the south and you, I’ve no strength
to fly.

Strange bird that I am, squawking in spring, flapping
my wings wildly, I believe love will find me.

Will you find your way home, too?

As the second place winner in the Poetic Idol Competition, Dawnwon a prize package that includes a $50.00 cash prize; guaranteed publication in an e-Artella issue; free enrollment in her choice of Artella e-courses, the Artella eBook, "Behind the Veil", her choice of any e-Artella issue, and one month FREE Artella membership. Click here for contest details.

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THIRD PLACE WINNER



Karen Kuklinski


Generations

The soft blue blanket from my Mother's wedding
I only use it now and again
Threadbare for special occasions
From my Grandma, an absent Mom to my Mom

I only use it now and again
Grasping near the blanket to feel safe
From my Grandma, an absent Mom to my Mom
My Mom's castoff is my treasure

Grasping near the blanket to feel safe
I picture my Grandma choosing it
My Mom's castoff is my treasure
Not knowing how the gift was not enough

I picture my Grandma choosing it
Hands I never knew touching
Not knowing how the gift was not enough
Wrapping it for the giving

Hands I never knew touching
The beautiful soft blue velvety cotton
Wrapping it for the giving
Her future, never known Granddaughter warmth someday

The beautiful soft blue velvety cotton
Threadbare for special occasions
Her future, never known Granddaughter warmth someday
The soft blue blanket from my Mother's wedding


As the third place winner in the Poetic Idol Competition, Karen won a prize package that includes a $25.00 cash prize; guaranteed publication in an e-Artella issue; the Artella eBook, "Behind the Veil", her choice of any e-Artella issue, and one month FREE Artella membership. Click here for contest details.

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Honorable Mention

Tammy Vitale

Observation


Here is the poet scrawling
in her journal. Overhead blue sky. Nearby
yellow plastic tablecloth. Yonder
snips of contention,
colored red. Tomorrow
she will pore over the pages,
pluck the gifts left by her psyche
or some undesignated energy, take what she
discovers, extract and extend it, create an entity
subtle but shiny, something she, in turn,
can give away. Today

I probe the ruined garden searching
through dark earth for bulbs needing
defense against winter’s assault. The ants
in their nests are frantic with this
unexplained, unexpected intrusion, and I think
of her - how the accidental arousing of things
can initiate an incident so stunning
the conventional world comes to an end.

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Honorable Mention

Ann McGovern

Inside My Purse

A "passion red" lipstick to smear HELP
on a wall,
money to buy more lipstick.

Of course there are keys,
A rusty key to the back gate of heaven,
and a key to a box of secrets
I forgot,
a book so good it never ends.

Also, a ticket to a Bogart and Bacall
movie, one dancing shoe.
Only one.
I left the other on a cloud crowded
with everybody I’ve ever loved.

Here’s what’s not in my purse:
love letters from Picasso,
a map to the treasure in the northwest corner
of the Sierra Madres,
a tiny Band-Aid for
my broken heart,

airline tickets to Dalfour,
a little inconsistency among the primroses.
Primroses.

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Honorable Mention

Eileen Grobeck

Restless

Tonight I contemplate circles, like the halo
that surrounds the cheese cloth moon
as it spies on me through the window,
and wonder if I’ll wake to snow.

I think about how circles never end
and the power they have to keep things
apart or together, depending on
which arc in the playground
you choose to slide down on,
and if it will intersect with another.

I trace my circular paths and end up
ambling backwards to him and I think,
all over again, about how he’d feel now;
try to imagine his skin against mine
smooth as a velvet drape; how he’d cradle
me against the cushioned contours of his chest;
how his lips would taste

and what he’d do to cast the light
back into a cobalt sky.

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Honorable Mention

Pat Wiley

Sixty Looms Ahead

Lordy, hon, I need someone to bounce
And you're it, I guess. Aren't you my friend?
So sit back. Hear me:
no simpering old lady, me, when I get there.
I'll be
like Mabel Travis. She
said she didn't even feel real
until her 65th birthday. She chose to wear
a shocking pink blouse.
"Loud", Sonny said. But she just looked at him
and wore it anyway.
And before that birthday dinner out,
she ordered beer (in a public place!).
"I'll have a Bud", she said.
Sonny looked pained.
She was proud
of her own voice.
She hatched out of her restrained lady-self
and walked proudly
like a pink flamingo fledgling,
left the old eggshell debris
right there in the restaurant crowd
along with cigarette-butts, Budweiser cans
and a middle-aged stockbroker
she used to call Sonny.

Old ladies can dance a joyful dance.
I know.
In her 68th year Rachel danced--

holding on to the doorknob for balance--
who needs men?
Music from the kitchen counter radio
and grandchildren singing along,
patting out the beat.
Making cutlery and cereal bowls
rattle in rhythm
on the oak table.

I saw Laura order three workmen
to rip off the back porch they'd spent
three sweaty hours constructing.
Haven't done it right--damned fools--she fumed.
Her will, iron hoop forged for 67 years, fastened
like leg irons on men she hired for
her jobs.
She got her money's worth.

Three survivors I have known,
they all got out of this world alive.
Who needs a mentor now?
Mentor is another name for
someone who shows the way,
and I've had three in
this getting-older game.
Sixty looms ahead. Some say
it's the decade they dread.
Not me.
Need a mentor?
I've had three.

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Honorable Mention

Karen Caterson

On the Road to New Hope

On the road to New Hope
rolling down a Spring-clad hill
We rounded a corner-
fields danced on our left,
a Victorian house on our right
The sun reached down fiercely
illuminating every blade of grass, every leaf
linking Heaven and Earth
One ray pierced my heart
the curtain ripped
the Holy of Holies laid bare
I was seized mid-sentence
(words lost-thought forgotten)
catapulted out of the shroud of depression
into somewhere beyond knowledge
where I was embraced by
the grace and beauty of
connection, belonging, communion
the awareness that
Behind all pleasure and pain
whether we are awake to it
or not
Connection IS

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