Chronicle poetry contest winners

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle thanks all those who submitted poems to its poetry contest. This month’s theme was “One year since Oct. 7.”

Our judge was award-winning poet Philip Terman. Terman is the author of several full-length and chapbook collections of poems, including “The Whole Mishpocha: New and Selected Poems, 1998-2023.” His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poets and 101 Jewish Poets for the Third Millennium. He’s a retired professor of English from Clarion University, where he directed the Spoken Art Reading Series. He is a co-founder of the Chautauqua Writer’s Festival.

Winners of the Chronicle’s poetry contest are Tim Miller, Carolyn Kapner and Joan Wagman. In addition to their poems being published below, each winning poet received a $54 gift card to Pinkser’s Judaica, courtesy of an anonymous donor for whose generosity we are grateful.

War Song
And it was a song that seemed to go on for years, and it said:
“We all watched it approach and arrive and envelop, the war
that swept everyone into its arms like a devouring mother,
like a hungry father desperate to eat his own children like bread,
war the father and mother and ruler of all, and all of us
war’s children, and all our bodies only here to be butchered
in the new or the old way, our bodies the game-board of war,
war that rolled the heavens up like a scroll and darkened sun and moon,
war like snowmelt coming down from the mountains to overwhelm
and overrun every streambed with a shock of flood and roaring,
war like an angry word gathering sentences and momentum
until every grievance and old grudge, every ugliness
written with an iron pen and engraved with an adamant point
to poison every heart and every altar and every people
with prejudice, every word just and unjust, true and untrue,
coalescing into endless syllables of blood and blood-letting,
blood torn and blood drowned, blood drunk and blood painted, the world running blood,
every stream and bed no longer running water but running blood,
blood like wine poured out for the dead, and blood overflowing the earth,
blood soaking the land and darkening the roots and running in the streets
until every sunken feature in the landscape was merely
a bowl or cup or a cratered container for all this blood,
the world a fig tree hanging full with ripe fruit, the world a fig tree
that was simply shaken, simply shaken, and the fruit dropping.”
And it was a song that seemed to go on for years, and it said:
“And we were like scraps left on the floor of the house of the potter,
like scraps that were never taken up again, but instead smashed,
and we were like two baskets of figs left out for the people to eat,
but both baskets were filled with rot, and nobody would eat from them,
and we were like an empty dish that could no longer be cleaned,
and there was plague and war, war and famine, famine and captivity,
and there were dogs that dragged and birds that picked and beasts that consumed,
because there were no burials anymore, and the great host of the dead,
they were left out to taunt the sun and the moon and the stars
until those bodies turned into darkness in the sky, turned into blood,
and the last prophets and dreamers and elders, they saw but were powerless.”
And it was a song that seemed to go on for years, and it said:
“We lived in fear until there was only terror and fear and hate,
until terror and fear and hate grew from a small thing in the mind
into giants that stepped from continent to continent
and whose heads scraped the firmament and swiped the moon and tarnished
the sun with a war the world had seen before, but only in part –
and now a flame in the bones, cities crushed and eyes weeping fire,
and their sockets and the tongues of mouths weeping fire as they
stood there in the street, raising their hands against every other hand.
And veins running fire and mouths full of fire and mountains
like overturned tables, the dead boiled in their graves and the living
incinerated where they stood, moment and family and history
and country and border and home – char and ash, roads and memory
and words, prayer and loneliness and satisfaction, longing and rest
and entire billions without discrimination, without
even hate or awareness or vengeance, in the end – all ash,
every motivation and curiosity and tenderness
put to flame by a great unloosing, as if the first of us
to climb down from the trees picked up a stone and threw it,
and that stone never landed but was in flight for four million years
and in that time became polished axe, pointed spear,
iron sword, short arrow, raiding chariot, warship, trireme,
lance and spear and pike, canon and musket and machine gun and tank
and cloud of released poison and finally brilliant, incredible missiles,
a shower of metal and fire and a noise that filled the entire sky
like a sword dropping from the sky drunk with blood and gorged on fat
and going for the leaves of flesh that wither on the vine,
and going for the shriveled fruit still left on the fig tree,
the fuel of God and the fire in the stars harnessed by our hands
to empty the earth and put an end to all we could not outrun,
our envy and fear and disregard of the stranger, our hatred
of the stranger, our disdain of the stranger, and their stories.”
And it was a song that seemed to go on for years, and it said:
“It was war where no children waited at home for a familiar
return, a war where none fighting it thought to ever return.
It was a war where there were no cities left untouched, and no
cities to look forward to fondly, a war with no hope of home.
It was war where everyone fought and nearly everyone died,
and where the rest were swept away by the same procession of
final blasts and columns of flame consuming the earth in wave
after wave after wave of fire and cloud, wind and light.”
And it was a song that seemed to go on for years, and it said:
“And the sound was of a hundred thousand black poplars, growing tall
in a great marsh given to them as a place to thrive, falling
and falling and falling, the thunder of flesh and stone hollowed
or made ash, emptied or made fire, overturned in a once-great world.
And what a world it was, what a forest of black poplars,
what a hidden marsh to call home, what wide branches still growing,
what a culmination, what a pinnacle, what a sky to rise to –
what a waste of the sky and wind and earth, to pour it all out
over the stranger, over hatred and envy and fear.”

— Tim Miller

If I am to love you
As myself, then Neighbor,
How will it serve you,
To allow you,
To kill me?

You, with the cup of sugar,
I can borrow if I want to.
You, with a holy hatred,
I can borrow if I want to.

When you knock upon my
Doorway, no need. Come in!
Come In! I am delighted to
See you, and I am also prepared
To watch you die. So I will avert
My eyes from that semi-automatic,
Steel forged bouquet of flowers
You have brought, to explode my
Home into flaming rosebuds.

If I am to love you, as myself,
And Neighbor, I do, I really do,
Then rest easy. I am prepared
To kill you if I must. If your
Salvation, redemption, and
A special place in Heaven’s station
Is what you need, then Neighbor,
Please allow me.

Come in. come in. I make
The most amazing cake of
Bittersweet chocolate with
A glaze of light and slightly
Crackling orange sugar. So,
Let’s enjoy what’s left
Of my mother, and her mother
Before her.

In the silence, we will savor
This transubstantiation.
Swords into ploughshares,
Guns into flowers, so that
You will know as you swallow,
What I know, which is that
You are kind. You matter.
You belong. And you possess,
In the ground of your being,
An unshakeable goodness.

And I will not let you kill me.

— Carolyn Kapner

While Music Echoed
While music echoed
through the desert, and we danced –
blissful, serene. Blind,

they surged dark tunnels
for Allah, primed to vanquish
all Life, on their path.

“We hid in the johns,”
Amit sobs. Rare survivor.
“Bullets ricocheted

down lines of toilets.”
Hearts raced. Clutched. “I could not move!”
Screams. Moaning. Silence.

Watching from a bush,
Raz can’t forget how they laughed,
Raping. And stabbing.

Kibbutzniks–slaughtered.
Hundreds kidnapped, old and young.
The mangled. Maimed. Strewn.

At Kibbutz Be’eri
Vivian Silver lay. Slain.
Her life’s work – peace. Dashed.

Shalom aleinu!
And may October seventh
render worldwide…pause.

Recount and dwell. Weep.
Together try to fathom
their beauty. Their price.

— Joan Wagman