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Claribel Alegria in Exile
By Jacques Dickey
1st Place

My face is crooked.
The right side kept me from the stage.
At six, my friends banished me for writing poems.
Boys will not ask you to dance, they scolded.
I practiced reciting in the mirror.
I used my left side.

Once I heard a voice say: Claribel,
with your quiet feet,
find the dark places.
Ink is like food, harder than bullets
and stains like blood.
El Salvador grows coffee and angels.

When my mother took sick and asked for me,
my brother said, Stay. My cousin
the Minister of Defense, wrote, I cannot keep you safe.
The guerrillas named me She-Who-Speaks-With-Burning-Wind-In-Her-Mouth.

My poem did not save El Salvador.
Still, I wrote as if metaphor could be an emetic,
as if it could exchange my life for theirs.

Sometimes I feel I am a crow.
The day I read poetry in Paris
Monsenor Romero was shot.

In my sleep,
I saw children eating dirt,
vultures hovering over their missing limbs.
I am tormented by mirrors.

I close my eyes over pen and new paper.
Gunpowder tightens the air.
Under this veil, disease falls like unpinned hair
around the shoulders of my people.
In shallow graves, bones are blankets
glistening in puddles of stars.

In Paris, I dreamed my poems
were needle and thread stitching a moon,
torn while giving birth to a country
too large with suffering.
I cannot sleep when a poem stops breathing in my hand.
I thunder when it dies in my arms.

The End of Words
By Carla S. Schick
Honorable Mention

There are no words for this poem
they are the lost children of war
the body parts scattered throughout the earth
names buried with the dust of bones

No words for a poem
syllables turned inside out
letters burnt in the fires of holocaust

No poem
for annihilation
words with blown out windows
walls with the images of people
scorched into memory

no language
no words

a poem on a string of endless
beads of blood
dried gauze
deserted rooms
remnants of a child left
on the operating table
mouth opened
as though about to speak

Li Po Walks Lightly in His Garden| Top
By Peter Bethanis
Honorable Mention

A long winter.
A bird outside a window.
The armies have passed
like insects over an orange peel.
The last stick of wood
used a moth ago,
Li Po heats his tea,
refuses desire,
even a kiss
if it were offered.
Li Po knows the oneness
of the universe,
at the center
a deep suffering,
so he drinks his tea,
detached as a laugh,
admires the bird
then walks lightly
in what’s left of his garden.

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Tantrum
By Rachel Belloma
1st Place

February 28, 2003

I saw it on TV,
the fire and dust that flooded a city—
filling in the corners and alleyways
and saving shadows on walls.
The measurements, the points of entry,
the temperature at which steel will bleed.
I heard the unquantifiable put into numbers:
life, breath, air, sand.
From the body count to trying to find an equation
that explained why buildings fall:
x=our own times.
There was no comfort in calculations,
I wanted words.

As a child, it wasn’t so hard
to realize that buildings fall.

Maybe it’s just childhood,
how calmly things can be explained
and how absolute the reasoning is.
And maybe I just miss that.
Maybe I miss Mr. Rogers,
his soft voice and folded hands on a blue cardigan.
How he could tell me how to miss my grandfather,
just like he told me how to wear a raincoat.

Now there is no one left to explain.

Explain to me why my generation has found its Great War.
I do not want to hear our president, speaking with rocks in his mouth,
telling me the chances of my brother leaving his sons.
Forty-eight hours for another girl
in another country
losing her brother.
Explain to me, quietly,
why men cannot speak softly anymore.
I have never, will never,
understand.

Intifada
By Nathan Resnick-Day
Honorable Mention

For fetuses and pregnant women that are lost in the Middle East conflict

I am encased
in webs
and fishing nets,
the fluorescent ropes
of maternal evening.
It is warm
inside the black purring.
Tissues are my pajamas.
I hibernate in the hills, basking
in the throaty music
of this nest, rhythms
bumping against my feet.
What a world!
I can clutch this fleshy fruit in my hands,
I can taste this, this doughy moment.
I am planted like a harvest,
sleeping beneath the purple sky,
showering in battalions of orange clouds.
I am stored here,
packed in honey.
Now through her skin come booms
and vibrations, obnoxious love
tossing me like waves.
The sounds creep closer
like long shadows, coming to a crescendo
and suddenly fermata
as sun pierces the night.

Stopping For Directions
By Tonya Davis
Honorable Mention

Late afternoon.
The soldier wakes up
On the side of the road.
His feet are inches from the blacktop.

His coat is still damp
From a night of long rain.
His hands are warm in the pockets.

The soldier knows he’s in Washington.
Look at the clouds.
He’s somewhere near the ocean.

(directions for the reader)
remember a table in a meadow
hand-carved legs
chipped, turning yellow
think of Ahab’s

remember the beer can rings
the three initials carved out
think about the leaves
growing from the table
from the cigarette burns

don’t forget:
there are robins
fat and anxious
singing behind
the table’s blossoms

The soldier’s knees shake a little.
He stands and wipes gravel
From his beard.

In front of him is a road
Curving to the left,
Behind him is the forest.

(questions for the reader)
from which has he
narrowly escaped?
to which is he escaping?

what are we to make of the fox

trotting towards him?

what about the fork
clenched between its small teeth?

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Ali Ismail Abbas
By Daniel Amoss
First Place (Tie)

I saw his picture.
War is a twelve-year-old boy
With no arms, brown eyes.

Fire Burning in My Hearts
By Erika Lynne Tiemeier
First Place (Tie)

Dedicated to the loving memory of Anne Frank

When the Nazis first arrived everything was perfect,
They tried to tear our family apart,
We wouldn’t let them.
This fire burning in my heart was about to go out,
This fire burning in my heart.

We were too afraid to stay,
So we hid amongst the people.
At first it was fun,
But the world would never be opened to me again.
This fire burning in my heart was about to go out,
This fire burning in my heart.

I soon got tired of this hide and seek game,
I bet everyone else did too.
I had only three companions,
My sister, a friend, and Kitty, my diary,
The world was getting hateful.
This fire burning in my heart was about to go out,
This fire burning in my heart.

One day we were found.
I was relieved that I could once again breathe fresh air and didn’t
have to hide anymore,
But scared that we were found by the Nazis.
Hitler’s heart was stone cold,
Even my heart wouldn’t be able to melt his.
This fire burning in my heart was about to go out,
This fire burning in my heart.

We were put to work behind bars like animals,
We were moved to different places.
They all told us lies, and filled our heads with dreams and hopes that
Would most likely never come true.
It had almost ended,
When that fire burning in my heart went out,
That fire burning in my heart.