Announcements

We were delighted to reconnect with Bob McAfee, who chose the yearly awards for 2025 and the Fall Quarterly Prize.  He is an old friend of The Lyric and retired software consultant.In 1996, he had never submitted any poetry for publication when his friend Richard Moore, a Lyric regular, suggested that he  offer a poem. Seeing his poem in print started  a decades-long stream of poetry flowing from his pen/cursor (but no cursing). And nine books of poetry.   His poems have been nominated  for Best of the Net and have been in multiple publications.  His choices and comments follow:

• The Lyric Memorial Prize ($100) “Survival Measures” by Rebecca Biber. This sestina of coping with grief is full of unexpected images and wonderful word usage. My favorites include the variations on the six  repeated words (e.g., ready, readiness, ruddy, treading, unready, red, and reedy).
  • Runner-up:“Playing with an Orb” by Betsy Hughes. in this lovely sonnet, a snow globe the vehicle for expressing a grief that only becomes apparent in the surprising final line.

• The Leslie Mellichamp Prize ($100) “What is Home” by Dana Serea. This free verse poem creates a place (Razvad) complete with smells, tastes, sounds, and images. My favorite image  is “Home is where I follow your veins on a long, twisted road and crawl into your heart.”
  • Runner-up:“Lake Superior’s Shroud” by Cynthia Weber Nankee. In three five-line stanzas, I was thrust beneath the ice with short lines, precise images and long-e, long-i assonance. And at the end “all life’s slipped underneath.”

• The Roberts Prize ($75) “Long Lines of Gray” by Frank Coffman. Praise for the Confederate dead in a sonnet of mostly iambic heptameter, the wide lines marching down the page like a battalion charging into glory. Volta before line 11, an unusual choice. Maybe it is a “son-not”.
  • Runner-up:“Marshland Masterpiece” by Stephanie DuPont. In these four quatrains, I was  transported back to my childhood in Florida, “a heated breeze flows through the dreamscape pass.” You had me at Gumbo Limbo trees.

• The New England Prize ($75) “Exploring Dry Creek at Fifteen” by Duane Caylor. This poem is a memory of youthful discovery of the beauty of nature with striking images and colorful encounters, following the twenty miles of a small creek – unfortunately, to this young Adam, there was never a meeting with a young Eve.
  • Runner-up:“Roads” by Gary Davis. Robert Frost wrote “The Road not Taken.” This poem is the road taken; lovely images and a hearty promise “A road abides. It meets you where you live and runs you home when ways and days are done.”

• Fluvanna Prize ($75 “Cravin’” by Cynthia Weber Nankee. This poem on dieting is an homage to Edgar Allan Poe. Lines like “rapping fork, knife tap-tap-tapping – raise my white flag of a napkin.  Even the title made me laugh out loud.
  • Runner-up: “Semi-Colons”, “Commas (and Colons)”, “Apostrophes”} by Maurice O’Sullivan. I treated this group of poems as a single unit, each written in iambic tetrameter and with its own epigraph. I especially enjoyed “Apostrophes” and its introduction by G. B. Shaw.

• Fall Quarterly Prize ($75) “An Adirondack Autumn” by James B. Kobak, Jr. In this fall villanelle, the upcoming changes are documented and impending loss is expressed by the repeating lines “one scarlet maple, splotch of red/the trees turned early, summer fled.”
  • Runner-up:“Intimations” by Barbara Loots. “This is a Wordsworth morning.” This is also a Wordsworth poem, a sonnet of the morning, with absolute quiet until “one loon sounds its tremolo of grief across the lake” and the poet is cast into “momentary immortality.”

Also, we have the great pleasure of announcing the winners of the Collegiate Contest. For 2025 as well, thanks to Tanya Cimonetti, our intrepid, and gracious contest administrator:

• First Prize: ($500), Julianna Jarquin, a freshman at Miami Dade College, North Campus, Miami, Florida, for her poem “Compunctious”.

• Second Prize: ($200), Jessie Tong, sophomore at Johns Hopkins University for her contrapuntal poem “Forget Me/Not.”

• Third Prize: ($100) Margo Martin, freshman from Wellesley College,  Wellesley, MA, for her poem “Shooting Sparrows.”

Honorable Mention

1. Omuniq McFadden, Senior at Kansas State University for her poem  “Still I Rise in Every Season”
2. George Zamalea, who hopes to graduate in 2027 from Strayer University, which is based in Washington D.C., for his poem, “Contention.”
3. Isabel Bu, Senior at the University of Miami for her poem, “Take Me Toward the Distant Shore.”

Before moving on to Jonathan Kinsman’s guest poet preview, we must say goodbye to the dear, whimsical and wise Dodie Messer Meeks, who sparkled on The Lyric’s pages for 40 years.  She passed away on October 16^th 2025 , having lived 100 years and a bit. She was a talented painter, illustrating and contributing poems to the children’s book, A Bouquet of Poems, published in 2012, of which we still have some copies available.  I had the great pleasure of reading most of Dodie’s 37+ poems from our archives in order to share one with you in her memory.  There were so many wise and witty ones, but perhaps the one below may suffice to give you a whiff of her essence:

Things That Scare The Kids

Living with stage props I can’t let go.
My hobgoblin chairs from that last sad show.
Or painting the carpet to make it look
like cobblestones. Or gluing my stacks of books
with Elmer’s glue so the things won’t slip.
Tables of leather! Or seeing me grip
my way as I navigate the stair
of a morning. Or shear off my goofy hair.
Or hearing me yell along with Queen
about bicycles. Tearing these strips of sheen
from Reynolds wrap to twist into worms
for a mobile. Or trying to come to terms
with a chiaroscuro of celery tops,
transfixed with the scent, with the little pops
that celery makes. Or losing all track of time.
Or beginning, again, to babble in rhyme.
I don’t mean to do it but, honestly, I’m
riding on dragons again all night
and “Mom,” they say, “Mother? Are you all right?”

It’s only the little guys understand
which is, of course, why we are
labeled
grand.

Oh, we miss you, Dodie! The world misses you. And I’m afraid they broke
the mold!

Estuary After Snow

The snow like powdered sugar mingles
With reeds all iced in burnished gold
And up the rise you’d think Kris Kringle’s
Atop the hill, his sleigh on hold.
The fir trees stand so tall and stately
All dusted white and bowing greatly.

If I, a painter, brush in hand,
Would bring my pallet, easel, stand,
Right there, I’d paint pearl white marsh grasses,
And sweet chalk blue across the aisles
So joyfully to gather smiles,
From viewers all around in masses

And bring love’s beauty down to earth
Like flakes of joy –all peace and mirth.

Joanne Stokkink

The Snowbound House

Outside my snowbound house, the winter wind
Has come alive & whispers in a voice
Grim as a bedtime tale, where boogeymen
Inhabit ghostly circles in the void.

The storybook geometry of rime
Has etched my windowpane with haunting scenes —
A phantom landscape where the full moon climbs
And hangs the eaves with icicles like teeth.

The hooting owl, the howling of the wolf
Lay siege to silence –shadows on the snow
Tap with stark branches dancing on the roof
Where eerie wisps of chimney smoke now go . . .

Inside, the glowing embers in the hearth
Console with lullabies & soothe the heart.

E. P. Fisher

Freedom

I am the foam
The bubbles blown
The wind lifting the thistle
Down
And floating up
The feather along the breeze
Curtained window

Arching on the fly
To the seagull’s winging
And singing along the edge of the gauze
Sky:
The light lift of the heart
Unpossessed and free
To be
Uncared for.

Free to be bound
And bound to be free.

Christina ElaineCaffarelli

Confession

simply seven searched his soul,
all without and in,
hoping hard to finally find
a cache of mortal sin;
but he failed to find a fault
no matter how he tried,
so when sent up to full confess
he simply knelt and lied.

J. A. Wagner

A Hollow Chambered Heart

For Susan

The windows, wall, and floors are bare;
The useless doors all hang askew.
Each second footstep of a pair
Is echo now

Glimpsing The Willow After Sun Has Set

At twilight soft the emerald willow blows,
Its darkening aspect like the raven tress
My lady’s maid perfumed and set with bows
And threaded pearls, appointed like th’abyss
Of planets lit with stars more numerous
Than all the jewels in all the Mughal vaults,
Cascades on ivory shoulder luminous
Against the midnight falls, it somersaults
Upon her breast fast corseted, chiffon
With gossamer trim lacing ‘round, within,
The places that this hand once touched upon,
My lady’s places only I have been,
Her hallowed grounds; see where the willow grows,
My lady sleeps ‘til Heaven’s trumpet blows.

Peter Grace

Contributors to the Winter 2025 Edition

David Bailey
Hilary Biehl
Jane Blanchard
John Blanchard
Paul Buchheit
Catherine Chandler
Richard Collins
Gary Davis
Doreen Kelly Forbes
Annette Gagliardi
Daniel Galef
David Greenwood
Lucia Kiersch Haase
Mark Hamilton
Jack Hart
David Horowitz
Betsy Hughes
Robert Jordan, Sr.
Jonathan Kinsman
Len Krisak
Patricia Lines
Bob McAfee
Conor McGinley
Patricia Monteleone
Esther Noelle
David Aaron Nydegger
Michael C. Paul
Steven Peterson
Zara Raab
Charles V. Reilly
Timothy Sandefur
Norman Solowey
Amy Jo Schoonover
Alison Stone
John Wagner
Frank Scott Weitz
`Alessio Zanelli
Robert Zisk