Spring 2024 Poetry Contest Winners

We absolutely loved reading through your entries for our spring poetry contest. You delighted us with your creativity, humor and beautiful words. The winner of this year's contest is Brian Bindon with his entry, "Deep Spring". Second place goes to Barry Simon with "Chant" and third place to Tracey Scott with "Is This Heaven". Please enjoy their wonderful poems below. A huge thank you to Gervase Hittle for reading through the entries and selecting the winners.

"Deep Spring" by Brian Bindon

From the long disintegrated,
mute and forgotten
dust wallows of the buffalo nation

has re-risen and re-emerged
a touch of the white buffalo calf woman

wearing but a faint disguise
in Wild Idea.
The shaggy sacrificial spirit creature

of indigenous sustenance
lopes past longhorns
and calls its brother-sister creatures

to resume their wholesome lives
in the new thunder-hoof ranges.

Smiles wreath anew in the legendary

ancestral faces of Lakota heaven;

even some mild surprise, for

another part of the wound of the hoop

is healing.

"Chant" by Barry Simon

Prairie’s green blanket
becomes Bison’s copper coat
the Meadowlarks rise...

"Is This Heaven" by Tracey Scott

Yellow dust rises reluctantly in the morning sun

Small hooves kick

A Mother sighs

A early Spring frost clouds her breath

A calf is born

The Bison stand watch and shake the melting flakes of night snow from their coats

The prairie wakes with the dawn of a birth

Ancient history, hope and expectations all in that one small creature standing so unsure on new legs