Poetry Writing Contest XII (2001)
First Place
Sometime ago my father bit into an apple then placed it on a window sill. For a moment it seemed a moth had settled on the apple. I remember picking up the apple and its weight brought back a memory of walking hand in hand with my father through a bus station. I knew I had the raw materials for a poem. But for a long time the poem wouldn’t surface through the blankness of the page. Over and over I kept focusing on the importance of my presence within the poem. I had to return to that moment when my imagination had altered a bite mark into a moth. I began to write from inside that moment. The poem surfaced. I was thankful but humbled by the poem’s simple lesson: Sometimes the imagination exposes you to a new world but leaves you at its doorstep. — Eduardo Corral