Judge's Remarks:

Our world is brimming with beauty, as suggested here by apple blossoms. But we also face challenges and tensions in life—times when we need help and support. This bittersweet poem captures a moment of appreciation or awareness tinged with loneliness and perhaps alienation. We don’t know why the poet needs help or support from someone else, but we can easily imagine possibilities. The beautiful blossoms may provide some consolation, but still that need persists, and isn’t that how all of life often is? Perhaps by always remembering the blossoms in our lives we can more easily face life’s challenges.

Judge's Remarks:

The height of summer is when many people travel or enjoy vacations. On this special summer day with the longest daylight hours of the year, the poet hears a street busker play a song. It’s not any song, but a song from home. Is it from the busker’s home or the listener’s home? Is “home” a foreign country that might be shared by the musician and the listener? Whatever the case, a touch of nostalgia warms us. Whenever we travel, we too might be able to find connection in a song from home.

Judge's Remarks:

Something about that letter prompted the action of crumpling it up. And yet the person in the poem wants to revisit the letter’s words, perhaps to get past disbelief as a way of accepting thoughts that might not have been desired. The frost is melting outside, but perhaps an internal frost is also melting in a moment of complex emotion.

Judge's Remarks:

In today’s troubling times, no matter where we live, what can we do but try to continue living as normally as possible? The deft double meaning of “shelling” creates a twist in this poem, the revelation of doing our best with normalcy despite abnormal and perhaps life-threatening tensions.

Judge's Remarks:

The golden hour is that time of day shortly after sunrise or before sunset when sunlight warms with a golden glow—a great time for photography. In this poem it’s easy to imagine low sunset light brightening a pelican’s translucent pouch from behind. It’s a beautiful image with touches of sympathy we might have for the poor fish or recognition that the pelican isn’t going hungry.

Judge's Remarks:

​What are those loose papers? Perhaps just remnants of neglected garbage, but maybe papers that have been deliberately tossed to the wind. That mystery seems to be deepened by the winter night, a feeling of coldness coming to those papers, not just physically but emotionally too.

Judge's Remarks:

​This wistful poem is about more than just the end of summer—maybe also the end of childhood. Children (perhaps including the author of this poem) have enjoyed hopscotch and outdoor play during the summer, but now summer has ended, so it’s time to return to school, even though those hopscotch squares remain. And all too soon these children will finish school, and their childhood will fade just as surely as those hopscotch squares. This vivid seasonal image enables readers to feel and experience what the poet felt.

Judge's Remarks:

Is this the last bell of the day or perhaps the last bell of the school year? Either way, the image of the butterfly suggests a mixture of freedom and longing, together with a hope for the future—even while it still clings to what may be fond memories of school. This is a poem about growing up.

Judge's Remarks:

Is the wind blowing through these empty shells the source of the “music”? If not, then we can imagine all sorts of alternatives, such as a guitarist or a small band playing at an outdoor restaurant, perhaps heard from a distance while we walk along the beach.