Vanessa Zimmer-Powell: Top Honors: FPL Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Contest

Voice of the Bedouin

    after viewing John Singer Sargent’s painting, The Bedouin

How you captured my eyes, John.

You will follow their gaze

through Ottoman lands,

traveling like a nomad

with your white-skinned goum,

knowing only what you see:

skin, dark against

cream of fabric,

lips parted in question,

in command.

You do not take what I give you.

These rules between our eyes are fixed.

Here we own each other,

painter and painted.

Vanessa Zimmer- Powell, Top Honors, Friendswood Library

Vanessa Zimmer-Powell was the winner of the 2016 Houston Poetry Fest ekphrastic competition. In 2013 she won a Rick Steve's Haiku Award and received honors at the Austin International Poetry Fest. Her poetry has aired on the radio and has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies including: Austin Poetry Fest anthologies; Avocet; Blue Hole; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems;  Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; Chaffey Review; Copperfield Review; Ekphrasis; Houston Poetry Fest Anthologies; San Pedro River Review; the Texas Poetry Calendar; and Untamable City. Her chapbook, Woman Looks into an Eye, is published by Dancing Girl Press.

Donna Cozart Pauley: Top Honors: FPL Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Contest

The Yellow Scale by Frantisek Kupka

Yellow

always catches me by surprise –

Every spring, like Persephone, their patron saint, the jonquils and daffodils resurrected

in my grandparents’ bottom pasture, their lemony hue glistening in the sunlight,

a spot of distant brightness amidst the green swirl.

As a child I ambled through the tall, swaying grass, as children are wont to do,

stooping occasionally to pick an errant pink primrose,

the ubiquitous wildflower we call buttercup in the South,

breathing in the velvet petals until they stuck to my skin, the stamen sprinkling dusty freckles of

          pollen across my nose, nimbly dodging the bumblebees flitting from bloom to bloom,

a certain method to their seemingly careless flight,

their back legs encrusted with that same saffron pollen which they scattered to the hungry

breezes       as canary-colored butterflies,                    diaphanous-winged,

swooped    in delicate arcs     through      the warmed air.

On those radiant spring days,

my life stretched endlessly before me,

and,   having not yet flown too close to the unforgiving sun,

my own fragile, new-feathered wings still intact,

I knew nothing of impending loss.

Donna Cozart Pauley, Top Honors, Friendswood Library

Donna Cozart Pauley was born in a town of 200 in the rolling hills of East Texas.  Born into a family of prolific oral storytellers, she learned the art herself at the knees of her ten grandparents, telling her own stories in both prose and verse.  She has been teaching English at Alvin High School for the past 22 years and is currently working on her PhD in literature at the University of Houston.  Just like those silent trees falling in the forest, words only matter if they’re read or heard, so she has devoted her life to the written word.

 

Second Annual Adult Spelling Bee Winners!

Winners of our Second Annual Adult Spelling Bee are Amy Moran, Ryannon Rosenberger, and Neill Galbraith. Congratulations! A big thanks to Spelling Bee organizer and moderator Syamantak Payra and the Friends of the Library for sponsoring the event.

Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Contest a Success!

Poems from 26 poets were selected for the juried reading held on Saturday, August 19^th in the Community Room of the Friendswood Library.  Three Top Honors and many honorable mentions were awarded at the conclusion of the reading event.  Over 100 people attended the event at Friendswood Library. Look for jury selected poems to be featured on from the reference desk over the coming weeks.