Middle School Winners

Students at Sam Rotolo Middle School, Batavia, Illinois, took the April Challenge to write a food poem. They were given a special deadline, which fit their school schedule. It was hard to pick only three winners out of the wonderful pile of poems submitted. Here are the three winning poems.


If Potatoes Ruled the Earth
By Owen C.

You can mash ‘em,
You can boil ‘em,
You can stick ‘em in a stew;
But what on earth would happen if
Potatoes gobbled you?

Potatoes munch on people chips
While being very lazy.
Some don’t eat meat with humans,
For reasons, some say hazy.
People chopped up thinly,
And always salted well,
No one would think it crazy,
Like any form of hell.

No more time to write now,
I wish you’d let me be;
I hear a tater coming,
The cook is here for me!


Plate of Squiggles
By Sarah K.

It takes water and heat to conceive
Depositing the brittle stick into the mix
Sizzling sounds like a round of applause
Floppy-like laces spit and your face
Until the oar of the gods
Makes a whirlpool

The pale ladies nuzzle themselves in a round pool of blood
Turing and mixing till sun-burnt red
A very light coat of snow falls
And rests over their bodies like a blanket

The swimmers go for their last dive
To the empty pit of life’s end
The stomach


Grape Casserole
By Alec C.

Grapes
I open the fridge and find a bag of grapes in the door.
They are a mix
Red, sweet grapes
Tart, green grapes
Perfect, black grapes.

In the bag I find
Large grapes, with seeds
Old, moldy grapes
Some small, some big
Some crisp, some soft
A grape casserole.

I eat them all together:
Split them with my teeth
Devour them whole.
Squish them with my feet.
They complain by letting out a little whine.


In this selection of poems we have examples of rhymed and unrhymed poems, use of imagination, appeal to a variety of senses (taste, sight, sound), metaphor, and pun.

If you are a teacher and would like your students to participate in an upcoming poetry challenge, contact Wilda Morris at wildamorris [at] ameritech [dot} net. Remove the spaces and brackets in the e-mail address and change the "at" to @ and the word dot to the period.


Poets own full rights to their own poems.

© 2010 Wilda Morris