Seventh Annual Poetry Contest

Annual Spirit First Poetry Contest

Deadline: February 29, 2016
First Prize: $200
Second Prize: $150
Third Prize: $100

Complete Guidelines:

Spirit First is pleased to announce its Seventh Annual Meditation Poetry Contest. Poetry submissions may be of any length and any style but must have a theme of Meditation or Mindfulness. Poems may reflect any discipline, any faith, or none. Poems must be previously unpublished.

Enter up to three submissions. Poems beyond three submissions will not be considered.

Please submit your poems by email unless you do not have access to the Internet. Poems will be accepted by U.S. Postal Service for those who do not have Internet access. All others are requested to be emailed. Poems sent by U.S. Postal Service will not be returned. Poems must be received by February 29, 2016.

Please submit your poems all in one file or inside the body of an email (rather than three poems in three separate files). Be sure to include the author's name, address, telephone number, and email address. There is no cost to enter this contest. Submissions must be received no later than February 29, 2016. Please note: We are sorry to say we are unable to provide personal evaluations/reviews of individual poems. 

Winners will be announced on or before June 30, 2016, on the Spirit First website at www.spiritfirst.org. Winning poems will be published on the Spirit First website, the Spirit First Facebook page, the Spirit First blog, and in a Spirit First newsletter (authors retain full rights to their poems).

How to submit:

By email: send to meditate@spiritfirst.org.

By U.S. Postal Service (for those without Internet access): send to the following address:

Spirit First Poetry Contest
PO Box 8076
Langley Park, MD 20787

To all our participating poets, thank you for your beautiful words. We look forward to reading your poems!

First-Place Winner: "Soul Mate" by Ginna Wilkerson

Ginna Wilkerson has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from University of Aberdeen. Her first poetry collection, Odd Remains, was released in 2013. Currently Ginna is making a transition from poetry to prose, working on mixed media art, and looking forward to residencies in Canada and Finland in 2015. Her work can be seen on her website at www.ginnawilkerson.weebly.com.

Soul Mate

by Ginna Wilkerson

She lives

underneath my closed eyelids,

in the bones of my fingers,

the curve of my elbow

and the soles of my feet.

She is five years old and thirteen,

seventeen and twenty-five,

thirty-three and forty-seven.

She knows why I named my doll Fingernail;

why I cried most days in eighth grade.

Why I thought  - for a week or a month -

that I wanted to marry a drummer

instead of going away to college.

She remembers how

I refused to leave the town I said I hated,

and move to the city

to dance on Broadway.

She still feels the agony of childbirth

and the complicated joy of motherhood.

She was in that pub

when I met a spell-weaving woman

who almost wrecked my world,

and she watched

as the love of my life

walked through a restaurant door

and into my world -

in that same hated small town.

I took Her with me when I fell in love,

moved on, and found satisfaction in living.

When I die,

she is the one who will rest in peace, 

soar away into spirit, 

and meld with the fabric of the universe. 

Second-Place Winner: "Midsummer Meditation" by David Allen Sullivan

David Allen Sullivan’s first book, Strong-Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press, and three of its poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a multi-voiced manuscript about the war in Iraq, was published by Tebot Bach. A book of translation from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet was published in 2013, and Black Ice, about his father’s dementia and death, is forthcoming from Turning Point. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his love, the historian Cherie Barkey, and their two children, Jules and Mina Barivan. He was awarded a Fulbright, and taught in China for one year (yesdasullivan.tumblr.com). His poems and books can be found at http://davidallensullivan.weebly.com/index.html.

Midsummer Meditation  

by David Allen Sullivan

Make of yourself a gourd.

Dry yourself of all desires.

Let the few true thoughts

inside you rattle in the hollow

chamber. Let that music be

what sustains you. And when

you, at last, split open, let

the seeds fly. Perhaps a few

will even catch fire in fertile

ground and fly again. Sun-

baked, nuzzled by the rains,

touched by creature mouth

or kind hands. We don’t know

what we’re doing. Might as well

let go of our hard grasping.

Sun doesn’t judge your worth.

So why do you deem yourself

less than anything under it?

Third-Place Winner: "Eyes Closed" by Jeanie Greensfelder

Jeanie Greensfelder, a psychologist and poet, is author of Biting the Apple, Penciled In, 2012, and Marriage and Other Leaps of Faith, Penciled In, 2015. She’s had a poem published on Writer’s Almanac and in American Life in Poetry. Her poems are in forthcoming anthologies: Pushing the Envelope: Epistolary Poems, Paris, and 30 Years of the San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival; in journals: Askew, Miramar, Orbis, Echoes, Grand, Kaleidoscope, Porter Gulch Review, Poetic Medicine Journal, Riptide, Falling Star, and If&When. She lives in San Luis Obispo, California. Her poems can be read at jeaniegreensfelder.com.

Eyes Closed

by Jeanie Greensfelder

I visit a meditation group to learn 

what lures them here. Some sit 

on mats, others on chairs. A bell rings.

Silence begins. Inhale, exhale. I try

to quiet my thoughts: I’m hungry, restless 

and give in to my urge to peek:

I see faces with masks removed.

I’ve trespassed into the vulnerability 

hidden by open eyes.

Yesterday in the checkout aisle, a mother, 

carrying her infant, shared his sleeping face:

innocence, guilelessness—our paradise lost.

And here, for this half hour, people come,

sit, and enter that state. Now I’m hungry

to join them. I shut my eyes.

2015 Fourth-Place Winner: "Spook Distance" by Temple Cone

Temple Cone is the author of three books of poetry: That Singing, The Broken Meadow, and No Loneliness. A professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Spook Distance

by Temple Cone

1.

Wintering ducks

scatter from waters below the seawall

when I run by,

            spooking, spooked.

So have you, Lord, fled my very presence.

2.

Ten miles a day, fifteen—

I run so I won’t need bourbon,

fatigue a lighthouse

guiding me

through rough waves. 

Hell is

when I cannot tire myself enough

and must go to bed

sore, drunk,

and waiting for the light.

3.

No, hell is more

like an equation

you study so closely

it seeps into your marrow,

except in the case of hell

it’s not the quadratic you’re learning,

but how you truly are

a sonofabitch,

how, if sonofabitches like yourself

were desirable

commodities, like copper or wheat,

and there were a market

devoted

to dealing in them,

with brokers, a stock exchange,

and daily market reports,

brother,

you’d have it cornered.

4.

Samuel Beckett

says only one

of the crucified thieves

was saved. Maybe I

ought to stop

reading Beckett.

5.

Lord,

you who can,

as through a veil

of pine woods

and drifting snow,

find the me that is me,

when will you begin

to (gentle

as wind’s breath

or the light

of dead stars) have mercy

for the guilty,

mercy

for the broken-hearted?

6.

When every blade offers

a window onto the sunset,

a friend invites me

to stay in NYC

as long as needed.

When the bus lurches forth,

a black highway

stretching behind,

my only company is an iPod

full of Te Deums and Magnificats.

And when I scroll through

the playlists,

the ticking in my earbuds

is worrisome as a bad heart.

7.

On the subway,

I hear a battered man

slurring

from the effort

to hold his madness close:

Everyone, I am

fallen hard

and could use any comfort

you might spare.

          Like the rest,

I turn my eyes away, thinking

how vile I am

for the little I’ve done

to help lives not my own,

a thought that consoles

precisely

because it asks me

to do nothing at all.

8.

E.M. Cioran says

every book is a suicide

postponed.

       Yeah, maybe

I ought to stop

reading Cioran, too.

9.

At the Cloisters,

on a stone wall, a torso

of Christ curves at the hip

like a bow,

the unseen arrow

lodged in my heart.

Even if I could disavow,

Lord, my love

of beauty,

sacrifice it unto you,

I could not help

but see the lovely brow,

the face more present

for being lost.

10.

Dawn, leaving

the third-floor walk-up,

I meet a slate-and-white pigeon

on the street

         who flutters

a little beyond me,

but doesn’t fly away.

11.

Finally, I stand

beneath El Greco’s vision

of the opening of the Fifth Seal.

St. John reaches to heaven,

his body a candle flame

trembling in the wind.

The skin of the risen

is bruised with shadow

and flashes of white,

as if lightning had just struck close by

and by some miracle

not harmed a soul.

12.

There are two distances

between us—

a closeness whence you fly from me

and a vastness

wherein you remain.

In the interstice between

dances an angel.

Spirit First Poetry Contest 2015

Our 6^th annual Spirit First poetry contest received an amazing 2,097 poems—a record-breaking year for us! Poems came in from 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 44 foreign countries (the missing U.S. state was Hawaii). 

Poems from outside the U.S. arrived from Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Canada, Cook Islands, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Lagos, Luxembourg, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Republic of Mauritius, Romania, Scotland, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tunisia, UAE/Abudhabi, UAE/Dubai, and Ukraine. The foreign nation with the most entries was India, with nearly 100 poems entered. The American state with the most entries was California with 175 poems, followed by New York and then New Jersey. We received 300 poems without information on physical location (city/state/country).

Thank you to all who participated—we appreciate every poet, every poem. Your writing on the themes of meditation and mindfulness is important to the world, and what a great work it was to select winners from so many beautiful words. Very special thanks to our team of judges and all your efforts to select the winners.