Winners of the July 2001
      WHC Shortverses Crystalline Kukai
            Judge: Denis Garrison

      FIRST PLACE

This hot summer night,
the ever-moving stars above your face and mine.

      Maria Steyn

Judge's Notes: This beautiful couplet is a perfectly realized irregular crystalline. The stillness of deep summer is emphasized by the contrasting motion of the stars. The context evokes a diamantine sky filled with millions of stars. The summer stillness evokes a strong sense of waiting, of expectation, and yet of repose, for the couple. The diction is completely natural and subtly rhythmic, and the slant rhyme adds to the euphony of the verse. Exquisite!

      SECOND PLACE

Heat lightning in the distance;
feeling the bones beneath your fragile skin.

      Marjorie Buettner

Judge's Notes: This slightly irregular crystalline is both beautiful and powerful. While unrhymed, the internal resonances of the verses give a similar effect. (N.B. I read "fragile" with a long-I vowel sound, fra-jyle.) The diction is entirely natural and unaffected. The couplet operates on at least two levels. The literal level is a lovely, almost nostalgic, image of late day during the heat of summer, spent with a dear one (surely so, as they are touching). The next level is both powerful and threatening: the lightning's threat evokes the inescapable threat of mortality, intimated most evocatively here, which is both specific to the one person and also universal. What an unforgettable couplet!

      THIRD PLACE

Caressing winds help me to slough
the skin of thick clothes and cold reserve.

      Florence Vilén

Judge's Notes: This is a lovely regular crystalline, notable for its straightforward syntax, completely natural diction. This is an important feature as the couplet contains a conceit, i.e., a fanciful metaphor: the skin of clothes and reserve. The two features balance one another. The couplet is very symmetrical, not only in the balanced content, but in the first and last words which express the ends of a spectrum of the poet's response. Albeit a very gentle poem, it is quite comic in its image of an uptight person throwing reserve and clothes to those caressing winds. It is endearing, at least to those of us who can identify with the persona and the impulsive surrender to the summer winds. The choice of "the" instead of "my" for beginning the second line subtly shows how the persona disassociates from her/his own reserve. Both lovely and funny - a wonderful crystalline!

      HONORABLE MENTION

Clouds inside the garden wall
slide around and around a gazing ball.

      Debra Woolard Bender

Judge's Notes: This slightly irregular rhymed crystalline gives us a lovely image of the gazing ball in a summer garden with the clouds and sky wrapped around it like a miniature heavens. The ball brings the overhead clouds down into the light-flooded garden and captures them for the enjoyment of the gardener. The carefully chosen diction -- "garden wall ... gazing ball" "around and around" -- concretize the circling clouds; a real "objective correlative" success and wonderfully mnemonic.

      HONORABLE MENTION

Still seeing your face in winter dreams
my summer friend, do you miss me?

      Carol Raisfeld

Judge's Notes: This regular crystalline evokes nostalgia as well as loss. The poet also manages to use a question without running afoul of the usual forced diction that so often accompanies the interrogative form. What is not said in this poem is as important as what is said: this archetypal plaint of summer relationships can be read many ways depending on what the reader brings to it. A lovely couplet.

      HONORABLE MENTION

Awakened from dreams of snow angels
by the rattle-whirr of a fan.

      Terrie Relf

Judge's Notes: This regular crystalline attracts us through the power of recognition of a common experience. The rude awakening is supported by the sharp change in rhythm from line 1 to line 2. I like the unique onomatopoeic fan noise - it works for me - I have heard that rattle-whirr. This is a fine comic verse.

      HONORABLE MENTION

We stand alone on different shores -
This ebb and flow of my heart, of yours.

      Dina E. Cox

Judge's Notes: This regular crystalline, while less explicitly so, also deals with summer relationships. It is notable for its musicality, enhanced by the end rhyme, and for it symmetricallity. I especially like the economy of the diction, allowing substantial content within seventeen syllables. Really lovely!