Wallace Winchell Contest
Winning Poems 2008
First place
Nicholas Giosa of Wethersfield , CT
Dear Theo
( Vincent van Gogh and his younger brother, Theo, lie side by side in a cemetery in Auvers. It was Theo who sustained Vincent throughout his career with money and painting material and who preserved his paintings. )
Now, more than one hundred years after
the death of your brother,
having stepped in his room,
at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de- Mausole
in Saint-Remy,
stared at the gloom
of its barred windows and greenish gray walls;
having knelt at your graves
at Auvers;
I weigh your memory
with praise
and a true sense of awe,
as to how you patiently gave
a lifetime of love…whatever his ways.
Surely you knew,
between the writhe of the cypress,
and the “high yellow note,”
his time would be cut,
the light would burn out,
when you wrote:
“How your brain must have labored,
and you risked everything
to the very limit…”. You harbored
fears and misgivings, were troubled with legions
of doubt,
when you cautioned:
“Not to venture into the mysterious regions.”
Dear Theo, we kneel at your stone
with a small measure of love
that you constantly gave - as you saved for our eyes,
the cypress, the sunflowers, the rooms,
the unsmiling faces…the starry skies.
Third Place
Julia Meylor Simpson East Providence
Dear Laura Ingalls Wilder
Remember those dark nights you huddled near me
on the drafty linoleum landing under a yellow light bulb?
You whispered stories, while I turned page after page
to learn if Pa had found his way home through the blizzard.
We battled grasshoppers, prairie fires and scarlet fever
while Dad laughed along with Johnny Carson downstairs.
I gathered in your words like sun-dried sheets on the line,
followed your trail of black-eyed susans outside my door.
Years later, I walked DeSmet streets and Dakota prairie
where girls in bonnets and red calico pretended to be you.
I found myself on a rise above a desolate dugout replica,
leaning into the same wind that clawed your brown braids.
I followed a trickling gully past an uprooted cottonwood,
knowing you’d been here, buttoning up your innocence.