We held a contest amongst local poets to decide the poem for the billboards. The rules were that the poem had to be about or include some aspect of Utah culture, landscape or history. We received many, many entries and spent a long time choosing the perfect poem for the billboards. We wanted to share some of the other wonderful work we received. At some point we’d like to make a page with all of the entries and a place for people to upload and share their own work. (also, the format of this site wouldn’t let me keep the original formatting of a couple of the poems, but I tried my best to keep everything the same.)
Here is the winning poem by Derek Henderson:
Derek Henderson is the author of Thus & (If P Then Q Press) and co-author, with Derek Pollard, of Inconsequentia (BlazeVox Books). He recently completed his PhD in Poetry at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Small Prayer
All secrets, all smiles
invisible in my house.
There is a bird in the woods whose song stops you
in a field full of tulips.
Whatever you say
if you wake up sometime—on the steps of the
roads that are not roads, as
night swells seaweed—
amend, thank-you, amen.
Here are the ten finalists:
Inheritance
Sunset enacts the fire of the stars,
and your shadow makes you
fifty feet tall. Walk a dirt road
down the lap of the valley
through fields turned golden
as the velvet folds of a mother’s dress.
The mountains above you, a father’s
craggy arms, snag water from the belly
of the clouds. Bend over the river
they send and drink deeply of home.
–Susan Howe
An Angel Might Be An Owl
They do seem to be intercessors,
calling out across the empty spaces,
their gold eyes filling up zeroes,
their wings like a bridge, something reaching
from up to down, lower to higher,
at least for a while.
I miss my owl’s company.
I wish it had stayed all summer.
But maybe, like angels, they belong to no one.
Maybe wildness is an answer from the sky.
-Rob Carney
Naming
We disturb the leisure of nowhere
with our naming. A mountain lake needs
no name to cuddle cutthroat trout. The cutthroat
know the names of nothing when they leap
and plunge into the bull’s-eye of ripples. We wait
with lines out, hope we’ve found White Pine,
hear only the click of lodgepoles, slender
in the breeze. We long for certainty, as if snow
should care where it shivers. Or you and I where
we first tackled night under billions of stars.
-Maurine Haltiner
Spilling Over
From our canyons and gullies it draws and flows,
These rivers, these creeks gurgle and swell
Headlong across the valley
Like a collective idea rising, brimming.
We all desire some rich new soil of understanding
Ready for seed, ready for sun, ready to grow.
I will meet and course with the river,
Rush along the stream of opportunity to a place
Fallow with need, gather, gather my strengths,
Then leap.
-Larry Menlove
Let the Mountains Unhinge You
Let the mountains unhinge you!
Let the valleys and lakes draw you in
To knowing:
We are more than the buildings
We build—more than the tools
We fashion from the earth.
Listen!
The skies are starting to divulge in whispers
The myriad mysteries and histories
Nestled in our landscape.
-Sarah Duffy
Passage From Home Waters
Before they can be apprehended, the internal workings of water’s motions pass into the eye of the imagination. Standing in the middle of a river’s moving current, the world seems to be an embrace, a song, maybe a dream, full of changing forms and colors that pass before the yes, continually dying and being reborn…. The same substance, the same sensual reassurance of your belonging in the world. and with each immersion, the same mounting conviction of life’s blessedness…. Entering the same waters over and over again, it is finally the fact that I am a breathing and dying body that strikes me as the most strange. This wonderment at my own biology is the gift of the river, a fire of transmutation, repentance maybe, but never stasis. Home waters.”
-George Handley
Untitled
Sun leaps over a threshold of mountains
into the valley, barefoot and restless. Unrolling
her light—a canvas from west to east—she begins
her daily work, strokes in any color at hand:
pine, sage, copper, clay, autumn-aspen, the russet of hawks.
At the first shiver of night, knowing she cannot stay,
she will roll up her canvas (east to west), rinse her brush,
then pour out her waterglass across the sky—
the clouds will catch fire.
-Phillip Brown
Tree-Told Secrets On Provo River Trail
We cheerfully bid farewell to spring,
its white and blushing blossoms
and cast no backward glance in changing
our summer robes for party clothes.
In shades of cinnamon, copper, plum,
we’ll dance in wild time to October winds
until November seduces us again
and we shrug off our coverings and wait
for winter’s breath to cover us,
inch by inch, in diamonds.
-Heather Holland Duncan
Channel
after Henry Vaughan
Water
you are, not were nor will be—
as cataracts & creeks, as river brown as trout,
as kidney and as skin.
Water you are, not were
nor will be
rolling ocean green or
quiet
without wind enough to twirl the one red leaf.
What channel does my soul seek?
This—
snow melting from trees like rain, a clean rinsing,
a quickness the sun has kissed—
and this—salt desert water swollen with birds feasting
on brine flies feasting on algae—
and this—siphoned through sulfurous rock, glacier
old as amaranth.
I stray and roam.
To be useful, to be clear—
-Natasha Saje
Deer Psalm
They make the dreamer catch her breath –
Her heart pounds with their leaps –
They startle constellation bears
While Timpanogos sleeps.
You need not fear their forwardness –
They haven’t got a chance –
But just before they slip away –
You catch their furtive glance.
-Cynthia Hallen
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