John DeVore won 1st place for Poetry in our Spring Writing Contest this year with his poem “There Were Mudskippers in the Creek.” Final Judge Cynthia Robinson Young has this to say about his winning entry:
“I loved the tone of this poem. It was a narrative poem of a childhood memory, and it was really told poetically…There were a lot of lovely images, and lines like ‘Our lives were lived on other people’s land’.”
Here is an excerpt from “There Were Mudskippers in the Creek”:
We took the black dog with us sometimes.
Her fur was corded in spots, tail curved like a saber
One ice blue eye, the other half brown.
She ran ahead, only circling back if she heard
A cry or a laugh or an insult
She was afraid of men but not of boys or the cows that lived
In the pasture beyond the barbed wire fence by the creek
Where crawdads hid between the rocks.
John DeVore is a teacher and writer in Hamilton County, TN.