Best Nominated Poems

Our two party system isn’t working
Plastic figures, disaster lurking
Conservative or liberal isn’t the call
It’s the ultra rich against us all
For the people is what it’s not
All candidates have already been bought
Platforms built on promises and lies
Hear the people, ignore their cries
Wave that flag as if...

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I was an environmental scientist, working with large wind farm developers,
To harness wind and generate electricity, as a plum sun flees, to tell others.

I worked at helping developers comply, with all environmental regulations;
Minimizing the impact to it and populace, like storm tossed petal situations.

I conducted...

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Soliloquio del Individuo by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan


(Homage to Nicanor PARRA, 1914-2018, the Chilean ANTI-POET, winner of the "Cervantes Prize" (the highest literary honour for writers in Spanish), four times nominated for the Nobel Prize, studied Physics (Brown University), Cosmology (Oxford University) and...

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Our children are dying
Lying down facing the street
Our own kind has made the task easy for others to complete
From slavery by our own people
To the hand of those who thinks of us as unequal
For they too look at us as a disgrace to the world’s...

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Winter
by Michael R. Burch

The rose of love's bright promise
lies torn by her own thorn;
her scent was sweet
but at her feet
the pallid aphids mourn.

The lilac of devotion
has felt the winter hoar
and shed her dress;
companionless,
she shivers—nude, forlorn.

Published by Songs of Innocence, The Aurorean, Contemporary Rhyme



Roses for a...

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An Ode to Turkeys
     By Dane Smith-Johnsen

I
There was a time, year one thousand A.D
U.S. turkeys faced a brand new plight.
Usefulness seen.
Native American's hunting delight. 
The white meat of a turkey is quite lean.
So much healthier than man knew before,
Nothing one ever...

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The fear of Public Speaking  has been with me always
but never like it was on that June evening so many years ago.
I still get gut wrenching panic when I think about that time,
it really seems like only yesterday....

A late bloomer, extremely shy, it was...

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Personal Worth 
Everyone has value. Everyone has been called for such a time as this to use their unique gifts and experiences to serve others and to serve God. But what are those gifts? And which experiences in particular? Some things we were born with....

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A Circus Clown   Story/poem

Once there was a circus clown. He lived to make the people happy.
Everyday he would dress up, paint his face to be ready for his show.
This clown was not like other clowns. He was very special. Every time he 
put...

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       Hay un dia feliz by Nicanor Parra, Translated by T. Wignesan

      To come by a happy day

(In this poem, Parra maintains lines of twelve to thirteen syllables with every other line ending almost...

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Lord Krishna came 
Much later than Rama,
According to the Puranas.
But in my life it is the other way round:
Krishna, my Guru, came into this world 
Much before I did.

He is my friend, philosopher, and guide—
Not a cliché. 
He spotted me at the Mecca 
Of English...

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I grew up with rural Michigan white red-neck evangelical root systems.
These did not always feed my multicultural self/other liberation of the GLBTQ subclimatic root system
for regeneratively healthy instincts,
yet I learned to survive within this fundamentalist-alien-straight Christian White anthro-culturally supremacist climate of heterosexuality
not understood as a...

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What a name called? 
Football a game called, 
To known arena called stadium, 
Played eleven to eleven side to side each, 
Formations of it kinds, 
Aims of a two goal post net, 
Aims of a trophy, 
Aims of winning, 
In a color Jersey of its...

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IF EVER I HAD A COUNTRY : LXXVI

IF ever I had a Country with or without any " Wood " in the aching aping Film Industry
And if ever (you know the refrain by now) I were NOMINATED - not hoodwinked into 
   ...

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The air is heavy like a dirty woolen blanket
each colorful strand pulled through the warp.
Horns blare and traffic skids and screeches
as unborn accidents are aborted 
by fancy-pants cops.

The city slickers in their posh clothes
zip along toward the outskirts 
avoiding those in dirndl-shaped, Polleras skirts
and Monteras...

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