Scholarship Winners Announced

Winners selected from pool of remarkable finalists.

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2014 Undergraduate and High School Poetry Scholarships! Michael Mlekoday, winner of the 2012 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected the undergraduate winners from a pool of truly remarkable finalists.

 

Undergraduate Winners

1st Place: Ryan Lind for “A Kandiyohi County Road" (see poem below)

2nd Place: Amber Dean for "I was taught"

3rd Place: Kinsey Brown for "Witchcraft"

 

High School Winner

1st Place: Sydney Vargo

 

Congratulations to all of the winners, and thank you to everyone who submitted!

 

A Kandiyohi County Road

 

I don’t know how I got there

to New London, where he was building

a new county road ex nihilo,

as darkness began dividing the day.

 

Other colors retired; the sky, still blue,

made a silhouette of the Caterpillar

pushing gravel where a slough used to be,

parting water from waters, from itself.

 

I knew that machine was brightly

colored, though on that ridge it looked black.

And I knew he was something, too;

yet people still say my father is nothing.

 

I have seen him in relief, in the dim hours,

taming the earth, in the beginning

of those long shadows. And I have watched

his exhaust become atmosphere.

 

He showed me artifacts,

the arrowheads collected in his pockets—

those sacred tools recovered from the earth

which scared off ancient deer.

 

He told me the day’s legends,

numbering the pheasants and grouse

that flew from the brush that morning

before the sun was made.

POSTED: Tuesday, May 6, 2014 04:34 PM
Updated: Saturday, December 3, 2022 01:02 AM
WRITTEN BY:
Wick Poetry Center