Poetry to Go Contest Winners:
Poetry Thing
I suppose you’re expecting something profound,
Something oh-so-thought provoking, a poem to wow you.
You might want a simile like:
“The trees dance in the wind like a graceful ballerina.”
But I’m not writing that.
You see, I’m not into this whole poetry thing.
You might want a metaphor like:
“The clouds are soft pillows.”
But I’m not writing that.
You see, I’m not into this whole poetry thing.
- John Knetemann
Bishop Machebeuf High School
For Sydney
She’s the light at the end of this tunnel I call loneliness.
Her hands reach out,
grasping mine and pulling me along beside her.
With every step we take, my heart begins to open
like a blossoming morning glory,
unfurling to dawn’s first kiss.
Her laugh fills the air, giving me a new strength.
When she’s by me, I can step out from behind this barrier,
the one I built myself.
No longer confined, I learn to spread my wings and fly.
- Sabeth Lilles
Bishop Machebeuf High School
Piano
I can see my reflection on the polished face of the piano.
My shaggy, black hair frizzes out away from my pale skin,
blending in with the minute scratches on its face.
I cannot cease to wonder at the power of the many keys,
that if combined correctly, unlock people’s hearts.
The first resonating note pierces the air
with an almost sharp suddenness that bespeaks its potential power.
While it still reverberates in the air, another joins it;
you begin to see the composer’s vision—
As you sit there, a masterpiece is painted on the white canvas of the still atmosphere.
- Sebastian Vazquez-Carson
Bishop Machebeuf High School
My Escape
I get dizzy as life speeds by. Can’t it stop?
I look down to take a break. I am engulfed in my book.
Soft pages crinkle as I turn them. A musty smell wafts up.
I am now living someone else’s life, temporarily.
I am swept away, like a knight riding a dragon into the sunset.
I will live this mythical adventure; it is my own.
The story is my friend; the book, my treasure box.
All of a sudden, I am jolted out of my journey.
Like falling off a cliff, I slam back into reality.
Later, I will finish, but for now, I am thrown back into the speeding present.
- Elly Usick
Bishop Machebeuf High School
Glory Days
It’s game time, and you’re surrounded.
Surrounded by the dedicated,
swarmed by the bandwagoners, and
seated by the casual fans.
Just like the others, you can’t escape the hype.
The smell of sweat is no longer pungent,
players become household names, and
you hold your breath in between whistles.
Defeat is personal, and the glory days were meant to be relived.
- Paulina Limasalle
Bishop Machebeuf High School
Brain Waves
Never to be filled, cannot be emptied, my mind, the ocean, reaches and creates its own borders.
My thoughts, the waves, push, pull, tugging my attention this way and that.
Through the waves my memories, tangled, entwined, half-forgotten seaweed
Then snapping crabs, angry claws, doubts, fighting the waves, pinching them furiously, steadfast
not to be swept away
A lonely ship, my ideas, sail through the vast ocean, fishing for the best thoughts, throwing back
the half-imagined beliefs.
Without warning, a hurricane forcefully dashes the waves against the rocks, challenges the
thoughts, trying to smash them.
But like the ocean, the sun rises with calm, relaxed tides.
- Lauren Hames
Bishop Machebeuf High School
A Memory from the Past
His green eyes, his large ears, his crooked smile.
This is what I remember most about him.
About my grandfather.
I look onto his face.
I feel like reaching out to him,
Have him hold me in his arms,
Sing me a lullaby and tell me everything is all right.
Then I realize that it’s just a picture,
An image from the past,
A moment snapped into a memory.
- Isabella Roman
Colorado Academy
I Think I Remember You the Most . . .
The way your face crinkled and wrinkled at the edges,
each line a figment of your devotion to happiness.
I never grew tired of your smile nor your wrinkles.
I fell in love with the way your face became a mural
for me to dream of. A face I remember . . .
The way your hands twisted around mine and cupped
my face with affection I so desperately needed,
completely surrounding me with love.
I will never forget how those hands held me when
I didn’t have the strength to hold myself.
- Avalon D. Daily
Denver School of the Arts
Afternoon Ride on the Twenty
“I love the way it feels on my skin,” she says.
She, the modern primitive, rusty brown eyes, wild hair,
I am convinced that she was sculpted for the city.
We are pressing down 23rd, wearing muddy shoes,
And breathing in tandem with a pulsing expectancy.
“What?” I ask, unaware of the fact that the man who just got on the bus is
Experiencing profound loss, or that we will arrive at 16th and Tremont
Three minutes behind schedule. “That golden glow, baby girl.” She smiles.
“The way that little bits of blushing sun push their way through the city skyline,
That Denver spine we all know so well.”
- Arianne Thomas
Denver School of the Arts
Colorado, I’ve Met You
Colorado, I’ve met you
twice. Once in the flourishing mountains,
palms pressed to the shoreline of the skies
with annually blooming bells at your feet,
once in the city where the sun shimmered over a bustling landscape
only to fall brilliant and introverted when the moon made its entrance.
- Sophie Wilson
Denver School of the Arts
Let Your Heart Win
Believe in inspiration
Fly with your voice
Dance to an Invisible beat
Swim with your eyes
Cut with feathers
Speak with the waterfalls
Cry with the clouds
Just let everything flow.
- Elizabeth Harris
Denver School of the Arts
Winter Train
Like an old projector:
black branches
and white smoky sky
flashing together
in silence.
- Francesca Clifford
Denver School of the Arts
Boulevard Beats
Our city flickers.
She breathes in technicolor starlight
and dances to the beats of boulevard musicians.
We are rooted, firmly and whole-heartedly,
in her metropolitan blaze.
- Tenlie Mourning
Denver School of the Arts
1958
In the basement
under an old analog TV,
I find my grandmother’s typewriter
in a faded yellow carrying case.
Musty papers flutter out when I open it,
(ticka-ticka-ticka, ring)
aged poetry from my father’s fingers.
Running fingertips across the oily keys,
I can hear the past,
I can feel the future.
- Molly Bilker
Denver School of the Arts
5:00 A.M.
Mind drop—
The fright of dawning.
The cold underside gives out.
The light spills over.
- Justin McElheny
Denver School of the Arts
Almost Butterflies
The weird girl trudges through the snow
with cold stares at her back
and comes home a post-grad star
with a gorgeous husband.
We humans are not creatures of habit,
but caterpillars mid-metamorphosis.
- Dina Lipsten
Denver School of the Arts
Attics
Attics dusty with floating memories
illuminated in the late day sun
whisper secrets in squeaks as light feet
make their way across the faded floor.
- Dmitria Veselak
Denver School of the Arts
Your Delicate and Fragile Smile
Timid as a crocus blooming
in December,
it lay on the RTD bus seat
forgotten in carelessness
(or abandoned in uselessness).
I took it home and pressed it
between the pages of
a dusty Roman epic
to be rediscovered some chill winter
in all its faded, fray-edged beauty.
- Brendan Craine
Denver School of the Arts
Where I’m From
I am genes sparked from O’Neil and Carmack.
Years pass, I go from a preschooler to a super lifer.
High school looms ahead and summers are as brief as a strike of lightning.
Homework is a ghost, pervading all time and space.
I am from growing up and getting down to business.
- Molly O’Neil
Colorado Academy
’97 Ford
She spent her life escaping west,
I-25 and I-70, the direction of the mountains,
seeking solace in starlight streetlights on highways,
the gasoline haze of horizons,
instant gratification, no attachments,
and all the motion she will never be able to achieve.
- Taylor Brough
Denver School of the Arts
Greener Grass
It struck her that she missed the city:
the roil of damp steam from the street,
and the proximity of strangers.
She had left those blaring avenues
for clarity above sea level,
but now,
submerged in the flattened
expanse of Midwestern prairie,
she longed for urban resurrection.
- Maddie Rita
Denver School of the Arts
Summer Sky
Lying sprawled out in the yard, soaking up the world around you
Grass whispers in your ear as you turn your head to the setting sun
White puffs swim
In a toddler’s finger paint, blue and pink swirled together
Peachy clouds begin to fade to stars
And still you lie there
Gazing up mesmerized
At the simple beauty
Of the summer sky
- Sara Dalgleish
Nevin Platt Middle School
(
A turtle pokes its head out from under its curved shell
as it reaches the top of a hill.
When it is there, it squints
to get a better look at the rainbow above
and the pregnant woman coming toward him.
After giving the turtle a banana and a flower stem,
she grabs her umbrella and leaves
to see the slender moon outside.
- Elizabeth Blumberg
Colorado Academy
I Am From . . .
I am from the silk saris
That every so often gather dust in the back of the closet.
I am from the cool, sweet rain.
I am from the smell of orange glow on creaky, old, wooden floors.
I am from the laughter and giggling
For which I am named.
I am from spicy, scalding hot somosas, slightly burnt.
I am from the worn down, half-painted canvases collecting grime in the living room corner
And the tattered, stained paint brushes . . .
- Sabine Shaikh
Colorado Academy
#
A man stares at a street map
Puzzling the cross of four intersections
His mind trying to draw the lines that stretch out of the box.
He thinks about the quantities possible
And casually jots down a number
on a sheet of graph paper
Then turns across the table to his friend
Moves his piece across the black and white squares of the chess board
And confidently states, “Check mate.”
- Elise Chessman
Colorado Academy
Sun and Moon
The sun is like a painting,
Sharp points against the sky.
The moon is like a drawing
Smooth and curved against the dark.
The sun’s rays are like fire,
Hot and piercing.
The moon’s shape is like a restful pillow,
Which lulls you to slumber.
My eyes feast upon the sun,
But my heart goes to the moon.
- Alessandra Brown
Colorado Academy
This Majestic Place
Once upon a lullaby,
In a valley far, far away,
The impossible becomes reality,
And reality becomes impossible.
One can reach up and touch the stars,
Or let their hopes take flight to the distant mountains.
Where the morning dew sparkles as the sun rises,
And the sky lights up as a brilliant fire when the sun sinks.
This majestic place is where fish can walk and birds can talk,
Where cats once flew and where dreams still continue to come true.
- Nikki Antenucci
Colorado Academy
Things to Make with Q-Tips
Princess Crowns, but only use the pink ones.
A Christmas tree with presents underneath, waiting to be opened, a
butterfly with antennas, or a spaceship with detachable rocket boosters!
Self-portraits with flair, or even fake hair. The Giza pyramid, yellowed
with ear wax. The Eiffel Tower colored black with sharpies, an awful
smell. Chairs for your aging Barbie. A castle with Prince Charming and
all, Black Beauty all gung-ho. A stop sign, unable to stand on its own,
Candles, and Q-Tips as the wick.
But NOT race cars, those are for making with cotton balls!
- Sophie Fox
Colorado Academy
Apple Pie
The cheery rouge apples urge me to pick more;
I choose a couple to fill up the bowl.
On the shelf, I see the dusty old book
Which has the secrets of a majestic cook.
A cloud of flour fogs up the room.
As I mix the dough, it smells of cinnamon perfume.
Through the oven glass, I watch the pie,
Waiting and waiting as the smell passes by.
The oven bell rings and beckons my friends.
A message of wonder this apple pie sends.
- Kathy Papp
Denver Center for International Studies
Shared Souls
Our existence is a shared box
We slip through a blue ceiling
Floating through lifetimes
Side by side, perpetual souls
Like dust collecting on books
We are a double-sided page
Two wolves on the hunt
The last pair of kittens in the box.
- Franki Zinke
CEC Middle College of Denver
Postage
She knelt down, brushed aside the dirt and placed a bouquet of worn flowers
deep into the brown earth. By morning the roots had spread
from upper Albany to Long Island and down to Newark,
splitting the coastline, then westward through the fields.
When one day he looked out his window
from the slight bed placed between a staircase and a door,
he noticed something he hadn’t seen all season.
Through the bricks and the cement, between the panes and etched across the sill,
like teeth biting down to make words:
a single rose.
- Gabe Fine
Denver School of the Arts
(burn zone)
charred trunks like
creaking joints and she
wonders if this is like
walking through the catacombs,
believing some were entombed alive
(the roots must still be
searching for water
within their cocoons of ash)
- Alexandra Guy
Denver School of the Arts
Honorable Mentions:
Adda Cieslak, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Spring Harmony
Kelly Daly, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Playground Love Affair
Wynter Freeman, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Escape
Devon Garcia, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Blacktop Game
Min Kang, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Enjoy the Music of Life
Abby Neirynck, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Dancing
Lucy Rodgers, Bishop Machebeuf High School, Your Book of Life
Jack Griswold, Colorado Academy, We Are Denver
Sam Suechting, Colorado Academy, Advice to my Son
Weston Hamilton, Colorado Academy, $
Clarke Shupe-Diggs, Denver School of the Arts, Untitled
Hava Rosenberg, Denver School of the Arts, war games
KaitlynKraybill-Voth, Denver School of the Arts, Vietnam War Memorial
Anna Newman, Kent Denver School, Forever
Cynthia Jennings, The Logan School for Creative Learning, Petals