A shout-out to all of the artists who shared their poetry, and thereby a piece of themselves, in our annual contest in celebration of Poetry Month. Our theme, “Community,” can be broadly interpreted and it was, making it all the more enjoyable to read such a wide range of poems. We want to give a big thank-you to our judges for the time and care they took in reading each entry. They included faculty and students in the OSU Cascades Low-residency MFA Program in Writing. Senior Instructor Jenna Goldsmith, PhD, said, “All of our judges expressed their gratitude at being given the opportunity to read such fine work. The MFA Program is always a proud partner in The Source’s commitment to showcasing Central Oregon’s poetic talent!”
We also want to thank our partners at the Deschutes Public Library who provided prizes for the winners, during what must surely be a hectic time for them, as they prepare to open a state of the art Central Library next month.
Youth Category First Place
On A Morning Walk To A Bombed School
Benjamin Dean, age 15
Fissures in the cement sprout as if jack pine, and skyscrapers crumble as if the headlands off a coastal shore. Breathe in the parched nothingness of winter, and avoid inhaling the steaming sulfur, it’s burnt almonds and flames. Watch the protesters in the street, the protesters with their limber arms and their hand-held billboards. Squint your eyes and sound out the consonants and the vowels, their definitions.
When you watch the news, watch those men with their slick comb-overs and their vacuous pennyworths, practice counting; six hundred civilians murdered and one-hundred and fifty-three children shoved into crude graves. How many hands, fingers, would you need to measure that? Do you know it off the top of your head?
The mountains behind the city are a deep swirling indigo, and rays of sunshine on dew sprinkled grass are golden. It is the hand of the serviceman that is of a deep, carmine red.
Judges’ Notes: “This poem accomplishes deep emotional resonance through striking images that echo long after the reading.” “The observations here ring sharply true regardless of age, and the speaker of this poem is keenly aware of the world they live in, eyes wide open.”
Youth Category Second Place
COMMUNITY
Winslet Baron, age 6
Along the neighborhood
Around the corner
My house, there is
A community standing there
With me there too
To share our things
And to share our friends
And be a community
Adult Category First Place
pressure of the unlit
Barry Carter
Suddenly I saw the glass go cold and the cold go through
the bone and out the other side of bone into the space
that holds no light, no season and no answering grace,
and all my thought broke open like a stone the frost broke through.
I stood where dark had always stood — the true
and geological dark that has no memory of face —
and something in it leaned, not toward me, toward the place
of what I am when nothing holds the name I’m carried to.
It pressed with the precision of a name not yet confessed.
The weight of what I cannot start came down upon the glass.
The glass held. And the cold held. And the interval
between the seen and what the seen has always known, and guessed
was permanent — became the ground, the only ground. The mass
of all that dark said nothing. And that nothing held us all.
Judges’ notes: “Of the poems submitted, this was the one that I most enjoyed returning to, and I know that subsequent readings would be equally rewarding. I am swept away by the music of this poem, and its agility in rendering a fractured scene. Above all, this poem “resists the intelligence almost successfully” (as Wallace Stevens says poems should). This is a tall order. But this poet achieves it here. Thank you for your stunning work!” A “complex control of tension.”
Adult Category Second Place
Water Memory
Laurie Clark
I learned early what the body knows before the mind —
how to cut through resistance,
how to breathe between fears,
how to finish.
I used to cut through water.
Now I stand inside her.
They said paralysis and I said when do we begin.
Not because I wasn’t afraid
but because fear was another lane to swim through.
As a child fear quickened each limb.
So I went to her.
Found where she had always been waiting.
Held her.
She freed me.
The pain that followed,
leaned into,
lightened.
I lost the body that performed —
skis, rackets, sails,
the dive with a perfect score of ten.
Nerve damage. Arthritis.
The water didn’t close behind me.
She waited.
Divorced at fifty-seven into freedom,
I came to Larkspur —
vertical now, float belt around my waist,
fifteen hours a week,
where what I’ve lost
disappears into movement.
Silver Sharks who know my rhythm.
A nurse friend who sits with me
when words get medical and hard.
My neurosurgeon —
she came to me from the deep.
Some faces no longer appear.
We carry them.
And Mr. T —
wheelchair to water,
splashing his mother,
his vigorous waves reaching all of us,
screaming with joy —
we laugh with him.
A gift to everyone.
Fear, my whole life —
now I carry less,
a lighter body in the water,
words finding their way out in poetry class.
Silver Sharks nod when I enter.
I am finally saying mine.
Immersed.
Judges’ notes: “This poem portrays resilience and transformation as the speaker reclaims identity and freedom through water.” “I love the voice in this poem. It is knowing, one I trust and would continue to listen to—beyond the poem’s end. I admire how the poet reflects on the self, with a hand that is somehow measured and moving at once.”
Adult Category Third Place
The Weight of the Current
Manju Gupta
The river is a cold muscle flexing under the ice,
uninterested in the names we give the bridges
or the coins we toss into the foam for luck.
It moves with the heavy certainty of gravity,
pulling the silt and the pine needles toward a sea
none of us will ever truly see.
I watched a heron stand in the shallows today,
a gray needle stitching the water to the reeds.
It held its breath until the ripple became a mirror,
until the silver flash of a trout was all there was.
We spend our lives trying to hold onto the bank,
gripping the roots until our knuckles are white,
forgetting that the water is the only thing that stays.
It is the only thing that knows how to leave
and still remain exactly where it is.
Judges’ notes: “This poem beautifully reflects on the tension between holding on/letting go, using the river as a powerful symbol of permanence within change.”
This article appears in the Source April 9, 2026.
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