2012 Poetry Contest Third-Place Winner

Third-place honors go to Holly Hughes for her poem “Credo.” Holly J. Hughes is the editor of the award-winning anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, published by Kent State University Press, and she is the author of Boxing the Compass,  published by Floating Bridge Press. Nominated for several Pushcart prizes, her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies.  The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, a collaboration with essayist Brenda Miller, is forthcoming from Skinner House Press in May 2012.

A graduate of Pacific Lutheran University’s MFA program, she teaches writing at Edmonds Community College, where she
co-directs the Sustainability Initiative and Convergence Writers Series. She has spent over 30 summers working on the water in Alaska in a variety of capacities, including commercial fishing for salmon, skippering a 65-foot schooner, and more recently, working as a naturalist.   She divides her time between Indianola and Chimacum, Washington.

Credo
by Holly Hughes

Make a place for the glint in the seal’s eye that second before
it rolls back its slick head, slips silent beneath the surface.

Make room for the shimmer of salmon, splitting the sun, leaping
for the stream of its birth, even knowing what’s ahead.

Carve out a corner for the crab who grasped the blade
of the cleaver that sliced it in two, wouldn’t let go. 

That light, dazzling dark sea ahead, remember it, remember
how it seeps from billowing cumulous when you least expect

or how the sun finds the crack in the horizon’s solder to empty
out its cargo at dusk, a slick sheen across the water.

How the green spinning earth and blue brimming sea go on and on
even when we’re not looking,  and that perhaps, if we can pay

attention for even a second, remember just this, it may not
make us whole, but it could be a good place to begin.