Love Gone Astray - October Winners

There were a number of excellent poems submitted to the October Poetry Challenge. Each of the three judges selected a different winner. This did not surprise me, since I know that there is always an element of subjectivity in a person’s response to poems.

Grand Prize Winner is Michael Escoubas, whose poem, “Sailor at Subic Bay,” is the only poem selected for first place by a judge that was also picked as second place by another judge. This poem suggests that love that has gone astray may sometimes be restored.

Sailor at Subic Bay

(Hundreds of U.S. Navy ships docked at this deep-water port,

in the Philippines, for R & R, during the Viet Nam war.)

Her name is Faye

enticing

with cocoa-butter skin,

mahogany eyes,

onyx hair that shines

like polished Navy shoes,

falling, falling, falling

down her back, half-way to the floor.

Older shipmates caution,

Don’t go falling

for her sweet words.

The night-club girls

want a ticket to America.

I should have listened.

Instead, I send a letter

that fractures my engagement

like cracking

a dead branch over my knee.

I had fallen in love.

Of course, as soon as the ship

leaves Subic Bay,

another sailor falls for Faye.

At deployment’s end

the one I hurt meets me on the pier

with words I don’t deserve to hear,

I forgive you, forgive yourself.

We won’t mention this again.

~ Michael Escoubas

Judge Larry Turner wrote, “The language usage in this poem is very good, for example, "onyx hair that shines/ like polished Navy boots" and "fractures my engagement/ like cracking/ a dead branch over my knee." But the primary reason I chose it is the strong story it tells, and tells so well.

Barbara Eaton added, “What I liked about "Sailor at Subic Bay" was that, if your loved one confesses to you, they want to be forgiven.”  

There are two more first place winners.

bereft 

i thought

we were star-crossed lovers 

like romeo and juliet

the world held so many possibilities

for you and i,

but i should've known from that

moment that our love

was doomed to die;

it was a one sided love where i all but

worshiped you as the god you were not

and your 'love' was just lust

fool's gold

but my swooning, starving heart

couldn't tell the difference

at the time—

but it's like i told you once,

"hindsight is twenty-twenty";

and it's not like i can go back in time and

stop myself from falling for a fallen angel pretending

to be some sort of jilted saint so i try 

piece by piece to forget you somehow but i cannot

i am the girl that always remembers

the girl that always loves

& the one that is always left behind.

- linda m. crate 

One thing judge Barbara Eaton liked about “bereft” was that she “found the idea of not ‘bending with the remover to remove’ very Shakespearean.

Agent Orange Angst

Vietnam drives us apart again and finally.

I wail at night alone,

And grieve this guy who morphed into a monster
and forgot to be a man.

War is mean and menacing my marriage unmendable and i wait.

Hospitalized him in March mental health when he hired
a high school hitman
for a hundred bucks it's over.

I'm alive to pen this pain.

The social worker says "Stop saving him.  He's tired."

You mean spent...

enough federal money to compensate him for the battle
he was pinned in for

A Presidential Citation...

He used to be my pal.  A jolly guy who drank a bit too much
and lounged in front of football.

I fed him and laughed at life with him.

We made love and awkwardly we laughed at being best friends first.

I'm just an old piece of gravel he said.

  Not really.

     I loved him. 

        I still do.

But he's really Jekyll and Hyde just hide i did all the time in the end
of this eternal ending.

And I'm done spending hours calling the Attorney General

about this attitude...

Allowing heroes to age fast and abandoning them
in underfunded hospitals.

So i stood my ground finally and agreed.

Let him go.  Get an anonymous apartment.

I'll abandon saving him another time.  I lost count anyway.

Because i love him.

I'll relocate too.  I'm anonymously married now.

And I'll begin grieving this aim he has to drink himself done.

Because i love him.

And avoid assassins.

~ Sondy Sloan

Pamela Larson says, “The more I dissect this poem, the more I like it. "Agent Orange Angst" is the one I would pick and here's why: The form of the poem, with the variation of line length, made me feel the many steps to make progress, only to be denied. The three indented lines toward the middle reinforced the feeling that the love is never going to stop. It keeps pushing forward. The use of I vs. i is interesting; showing a loss of self to the situation at times and to the narrator’s love for this person, no matter what. There is quite a bit of alliteration and I didn’t feel it was overbearing or too forced. I would have liked a more visual picture. However, I think the lack of it helped to show his being treated like just a faceless entity. 

“The narrator certainly goes through a lot of loss and disillusionment in this poem. Love lost due to a break up is one thing but, love lost to a break down, to an outside force, or many, can be even more devastating. Having to leave love to the chance of it destroying itself, I think that is what is expressed so well here.”

NOTE ON "AGENT ORANGE ANGST": Some of the lines in "Agent Orange Angst" were too long for the format of this blog. I'm including the photo below so you can see the full variety of line lengths as they were seen by the judges

NOTE: These poets retain copyright to their own poems.

Bios

Linda M. Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. Her poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has four published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014),  If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), and My Wings Were Made To Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017). Her fantasy novel Blood & Magic was published in March 2015. The second novel of this series Dragons & Magic was published in October 2015. The third of the seven book series Centaurs & Magic was published November 2016. Her novel Corvids & Magic was published March 2017.

Michael Escoubas began writing poetry for publication in August of 2013, after retiring from a 48-year-career in the printing industry. Early in life his mother said, You have a gift for words; you should do something with that gift. He writes poetry, in part, because of his mother’s encouraging words. Michael also writes poetry because he believes poetry brings people together and that poets are menders of broken things. Michael has published one chapbook, Light Comes Softly, which is available as an eBook through Pronoun Publishing.

Sondy Sloan says, “I am a writer to a fault...it's a compulsion.” Sondy’s writing is often narrative. “I like to insert creativity even into non-fiction it's more interesting in my opinion. Less dry. So i scribble mostly in assonance and alliteration and i dance to my pen pushing me. A typewriter is like a drum. And as a dancer i try not to be discordant if not required. I'm retired from a dangerous job. So my tolerance was high.”

© 2017