Congratulations to the First Place winners of the 2021 Dayton Metro Library Poetry Contest!

The Morning Game

Jonah Dorf

Birds chirp like a million souls waking

As the world makes a sneeze  

Which blows the waters, which blows the trees

Like a million souls dying

Life will cease

Kids | Grades 3-4

Bubble of Hope

Carl Furmanski

Sitting alone at a table
Thinking how nobody likes you
Have you shattered your only chance? 
In a world by yourself, feeling blue

Then somebody comes over
Asks: “May I pull up a chair?”
Your world goes from black to blinding
Before this, your world was bare

Now you are laughing with glee
As if you had always known them
No one can break your bubble of hope
Now you will sparkle like a gem

Kids | Grades 5-6

246 days, 15 hours, 17 minutes

Mia Hayden

his sweaters still smelled like him 
so i would get through the day just to get home 
and collapse on the floor with my nose buried in the
collar 

it put me through hell, his scent— 
\it filled my nostrils with flames 
and my skin melted down and collected on the floor 
of the bedroom that wasn’t ours or his or mine anymore 
but i guess it had a time limit, 
and when i got home 246 days, 15 hours, and 17
minutes 

after i had last smelled him for real, 
it just smelled like a sweater 
had i forgotten his scent? 
had i forgotten him?

no, there’s absolutely no way
the smell of his cologne had simply retreated 
through the fibers and dematerialized 
because i could still feel his name scratching at my
tongue 

and the tears tugging at the eyelids i glued shut 
237 days, 20 hours, 3 minutes before,
because i didn’t cry at his funeral

Teen | Grades 7-12

You The Miracle

Danny Rodriguez

A great poet from Marcy Projects once said 
“came through the bushes smelling like roses…” 
A feat in of itself when entire systems work to erase you
even works of fiction conspire to remove you from existence
One skinny Dominican kid had no clue 
but his campesino mother refused to let up 
In one summer things went from shooting a fair one
to countless gun shots heard each night 
So much so that when detectives asked questions 
we just didn’t know 
Near misses, slow dances with the grim reaper, 
and leaving parties early to avoid gunfire 
Shell shocked into adulthood 
Lost found lessons, dancing circles, and books 
were my refuge 
A ragtag group of street corner savants showed me the path
People believe 
that walking on water is a miracle 
Is it the floating? 
Is it a trip to see someone else doing that? 
As if it was something we never seen before 
The best part was when an older cat told me 
when it rains, you walk on water each time
So you the miracle

Adult

House Cleaning

Kathy Austin

In each house
we are all on our knees
in a constant genuflection 
of scrub and scour.

Our close glances are 
riveted, objects 
magnified, inches
uncovered—
the baseboards, the hidden
spaces behind the books,
the ceiling lights and tops
of each door and window.

We have become our homes
as we no longer know
whether our kids return 
to school, whether we can
hug our grandma, whether 
meat is even available,
whether others are masked
or unmasked.

There, directly in front of us,
are cans of vegetables
we carefully organize,
gently pick up and set down
one by one,
in alphabetical order.

Older Adult