Hunger Game by Henry Crawford

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.