For the second time in as many years, Mount Madonna School (MMS) student’ junior Julia Gratton has wowed the judges and received first prize in the 22nd annual Santa Cruz County High School Poetry Competition. Gratton’s poem To the Janitor took top honors, while another of her works, 793 Cranes , received an Honorable Mention.Congratulation to Julia and the seven other MMS students whose poetry will be included in the anthology:
By Julia Gratton
You come when the day slips off
and the first pinpricks of silvery light puncture
lavender wisps of air.
When the taillights of Priuses and Teslas
and rattling old sedans
are just glowing red streaks on the pavement.
You come when the hurried, jostling
numbers have left those halls. Though the regiment of gray lockers
cannot remember a single face, they still echo with receding footsteps.
The basketball players and the teachers grading papers
the couples making out under the bleachers and the kids hiding in bathroom stalls
All have left.
Curling tendrils of the plant you bought at the dime store
wrap around bottles of bleach, mops propped against the walls
The Virgin of Guadelupe, held behind glass and old wood, shines her love
on the cardboard boxes of extra-large trash bags
their only purpose to hold
the unwanted debris of lives, the scraps thrown off the back of the train
Do you dance down the long corridors
mop in hand? Do you read the notes you find on the floor
imagining who wrote them, who read them?
Do you toss forgotten paper planes with practiced accuracy
into the trash? Do you
turn on all the lights so you don’t feel so alone.
###
The Perilous Horizon
by Holden Smith
walking alone
through great expanses
i look to the endless horizon
which bears the perilous night sky
tales of old
woven with the stars
run through my mind
are there any left to be told?
ageless winds
lift the world from my shoulders
all is forgotten
as i look into the great beyond
our faces cast across the sky
lives entangled with the stars
this story is yet to be told
i sit back and watch it unfold
###
Whisper
By Lexi Julien
She’s a whisper, that one
Floating in and out of ears like a rolling tide
She’s but a flutter, so teasing in her grace
A secret begging to be known
She hides in plain sight, behind those sea green eyes
As haunting as any stolen dream
Leaving a want for more, to hear
What that closed heart wishes to sing
I watch her now and feel a pain
But do not know if it is mine, in
My want for what’s hidden beyond those locked doors
Or if this pang in my chest is for
The one in her own
In her silent sorrows no one sees
In those whispers she seems to be.