First Prize

Hunger Pains
​
In a world where we are concerned about the economy and marketing numbers
How can we have people starving and dealing with hunger?
We’re too far developed as a nation to be faced with this situation
So we have a plan and 2030 is our destination
I’m not talking about decreasing, I’m talking about elimination
So nobody is starving or walking around hungry in any nation
Speaking of our nation, it’s strange to me
That in this land of plenty there’s still people on the streets without food to eat
We pay millions of dollars for entertainment but that’s another topic
People who are out here starving, we need to stop it
We have money for wars
We should be at war with not feeding the poor, this is something we shouldn’t ignore
Family’s walking around with their stomach’s growling and sore
We as the people owe it to each other to do more
So let’s depend on each other and help one another
To stop world hunger the world is going to need each other
So my challenge to you and my challenge to me
Do something small or large independently
Together Everyone Achieves More If we can unite as a team – world hunger can be no more
That sounds like a plan that’s worth it to me
So let’s embark on our journey and do little day by day until 2030
 
Judges’ Comments – This poem oozes hope and does so with music and rhythm that enraptures and inspires.  This poem does not equivocate.  “People who are out here starving, we need to stop it.”  I imagine this poem standing in front of the world’s crowd with a megaphone in hand -- a true call to action!

 

Second Prize
 
Hunger #1.
 
hides with you after 1am (btwn guard shifts)
trying to doze in backseat of your mom’s old blue CR-V (
good sleeping car, she said,
rear seats fold down,
her goodbye factory hands pressing your cheeks
)
parked under sodium light in the back of the chemestry building lot
next to the dumpster (with half-eaten mcdonalds other students threw out)
 
sneak into your dormroom (almost pranklike)
when momma’s check runs out
before the end of the month midway into the semester
demanding choices (am selfish):
study me instead of physics
nurse me instead of biology
pay me your undivided attention
cross your arms over your growling stomach
curl up
try to close your eyes
and wait for morning.

Judges’ Comments – This poem felt deeply personal and several of the references tugged at my heartstrings and memories, and it still really carried the larger picture of raising hunger awareness, without losing the specific imagery and personal touch   How do you tell an entire story in a line?  This poem told many.  Hunger -- it’s that pair of dangling parentheses.  

Third Prize
 
Shutter

For Kevin Carter, Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in The New York Times

And if you could go back, you would
You would pick the child up, gingerly like a newborn
cradling her large head, thin-skinned body, jutting bones,
And no mother you, but you would have hushed her
Won’t you pick her up, gingerly, like a newborn
Shoo away the vulture, whose crime is hers too, hunger
And you’re no mother, but you would have hushed her because
What distance is a lens, a camera’s shutter, snap that captures
Shooing away the vulture, (whose crime was hers too, hunger)
Framing a moment that will pass, like breath, like life
Because what distance is a lens, a camera’s shutter, snap that captures
Arid, ravaged Sudan, torn in two, like you as you crouch closer
Framing a moment that will pass, like breath, like life
And if you could go back, you would
into arid ravaged Sudan, torn in two, just like you, crouch closer
cradle her, large head, thin-skinned, body only jutting bones

Judges’ Comments – This pantoum resonates and haunts with its repetition of lines and vivid imagery.  It is a call to action for anyone who wishes she had done something differently -- “And if you could go back, you would.”  I saw this poem without needing to see the photograph, and for me it perfectly captured the false distance we place between ourselves and people we cannot imagine ourselves as.  This reclaiming the connection and oneness of us all was beautifully captured without being maudlin or exploitive.  This piece is piercing in its smoothness.

Honorable Mention
​
Ode to the Body in the Duman River
 
after The Tollund Man
 
February 11, 2008, Tumen, China: The dead body of what appears to be a North Korean
refugee is found in the middle of the Duman River. It lies in the frozen shallows perhaps
20 yards from Chinese border and 10 from that of N. Korea.
-Chosun Media
 
Pieces of you
continue to remain
unclaimed: frozen hair bun,
mud-caked skirt
hiding Bible pages,
feet bare, shoes stolen.
From a distance you are
indistinguishable
from river stones.
Ten-thousand river,
how many more bodies
live here, undocumented?
So short: the distance
between hunger & living.
In my car, I can drive
through three states in one day,
my worst complaint: the tolls.
My McDonald’s bags,
crumpled on the floor.
If only something
of your urgency
should come to me
in this warm full house
where you are a window
I can choose to open
or close. Do not leave me
peaceful tonight. Out here
in suburbia, I forget
how lost I am
in all these good things.

 
Judges’ Comments – The sharp staccato pacing and the mix of contemporary words with timeless nature images made this poem unexpected and striking.  It stayed with me even as I read other pieces.  This poem moves with its juxtaposition of haves and have nots.  “So short: the distance/between hunger and living” anchoring the middle of the poem is the turning point to action.  If only… says it all.  

Honorable Mention
 
Hunger Game
 
Into the spaces made by
words I go when famished
admiring the two tall towers
that end in ‘full’ or the way
the ‘y’ in ‘empty' is like a fork
of choices or the tectonic way
that ‘ate’ slams into ‘p’ and ‘l’
to make a ‘plate’ or how
the stubborn ‘n’ in ‘need’
can be undone with just a ‘d’
to do the ‘deed’ as the sum
of ‘something’ can overcome
the no in ‘nothing’ or how
it is that just a bit of ‘flour’
can go to work on ‘nourish’
to make it ‘flourish’ or how
a single ‘u’ makes all sound
in ‘you’ and a double ‘u’
can take an ‘e’ from ‘feed’
to make a ‘we’ to leap across
an empty space to ‘can’
the way two words together
can tell us: end hunger.
 
Judges’ Comments - The distance between rampant hunger and none, as this poem-near-riddle wisely points out, is really only the single letter difference between need and deed. 

Honorable Mention
​
The Voice of Hunger
(Writing the Wrong – Beyond the Wall)
 
Thoughts tremble and bend so far inward,
Shoulders become cups,
neck lines, exaggerated bones;
chests turn inwardly to reconcile the pain of hunger.
Hope becomes a wall, a place to write the wrongs.
 
Hunger awakens desperate voices
that echoes from skeletal walls, empty rib cages
that float above scarcity, hopelessness, disbelief
back into swollen bellies that do not distort truth.
 
An infomercial pulls me so far in,
my thoughts begin to run wildly through the brokenness,
the examination of thin arms and wilting legs,
small hands reach inside me, and turn the pages of my eyes
as I survey the withering and the loss,
the last hope for nourishment.
I become a wall – a place to write the wrongs.
 
A beautiful child speaks to me as if she knows my heart
Her eyes crouch inside my chest, and bend so far inward,
I churn into another time-zone,
She finds me pearled into a place of shame
a place where my heart tremors into fruit;
I follow her - inside.
She’s my teacher and I, her student.
I sit inside her risen belly – a look of distortion.
Hunger has no name. I write my name of her wall.
I stand in the center of her hands, opened;
she’s waiting to be filled with some assurance; I owe her that.
She lingers in my thoughts, mouth wide opened, like the doors of her heart and soul;
today, she represents every child, every woman and man
with tears that spill onto the shores of our cheeks – they need us.
 
I am left, contorted as the shapeless spasms
that live in the restless wake of hunger.
I am on the other side of a wall, still frozen by the growling echoes
of starving children, women and men who write their pain, daily on the wall of hope.
 
Let’s write right the wrong. It’s time to move beyond the wall.
 
Judges’ Comments – This poem inspires with vivid imagery and with its personal nature.  This piece illustrates how poetry – its hover and haunt – can be so powerfully useful in our fight against hunger.  “I become a wall – a place to write the wrongs.”  

Pitch In

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
Her meals were from partially eaten
sandwiches thrown in public trash
cans.
She watched a child throw away a sandwich
one bite out of it.
Getting sandwich from can immediately
would be her evening meal.

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
An apple, a pear, a peach, some cherries
Some grapes to help provide nutrition
To help curb appetite
Praying to God above, never to give up
Ferocious fight.

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
A project for many years, helping my Mother
Make sandwiches in our kitchen
with Family and Friends
Taking sandwiches to organizations, like
S.O.M.E, So Others Might Eat brings on
cheers, chants yea food is here.

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
Standing on Main Avenue in freezing cold
And snow, holding sign stating HELP ME
FEED MY CHILDREN, IF ONLY FOR ONE
NIGHT!!!

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
All across the world people die from hunger
 and malnutrition to ignore this plight would
 be a ridiculous selfish shame.

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
What can you do, what can I do, what can others do, to end this international plague?
The answer is blowing in the wind, doing
Something consistent, we can all PITCH IN.

People are hungry, yet people continue to
waste food.
 
By Sylvia Dianne Beverly (“Ladi Di”)