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COMPETITION

 

Good things come in small sizes.  This seemed like the perfect metaphor for a competition designed to help raise funds for Earth Love’s ten year anniversary anthology.  But this is a competition with a difference.  Instead of choosing the top three entries, ten winners will be selected, and each will receive a clean air tree planting kit, kindly donated by Mark Regan at World Clean Air Forest Initiative.  The top ten haiku will be published in the anthology.  The kit is 100% environmentally friendly and contains all you need to plant your own tree.  It’s like a trophy only, instead of putting it on a shelf, you can plant it outside your window, in a forest, park or lakeside, and have your very own poetry tree. Hence the subject for this competition: Seeds.     

 

 

Competition Guidelines

 

1)    Send haiku (these do not have to be strict in form but must be limited to three lines) on the subject of ‘seeds’ to: Earth Love, PO Box 11219, Paisley, PA1 2WH.

2)    Entry fee: £1.00 per haiku.

3)    Top ten entries will be featured in the Earth Love ten year anniversary anthology, and will each receive a tree planting kit courtesy of World Clean Air Forest Initiative.

4)    Deadline: 30 November 2011.

5)    Please include an SAE if you would like to be notified of the winners.  If not, the winning entries will be announced in the magazine editorial and on the Earth Love website at: www.earthlovepoetrymagazine.co.uk    

 

 

 

one little idea

all it takes to form a tree

potential for life  

 

 

World Clean Air Forest Initiative

www.wcafi.org (+44(0)8452723527)

Earth Love, PO Box 11219, Paisley

www.earthlovepoetrymagazine.co.uk

 

 

 

 

POETREE COMPETITION

 

 

For the past year, Earth Love has been working with US poetry editor, Stacy Smith, to produce an anthology of poems dedicated to our arboreal companions, the trees.  The resulting chapbook, Leaves of Poetry, features the winning entries from our 'Poetree' competiton: Loretta Diane Walker, A C Clarke and Andrea Dietrich, as well as the top sixty poems below, celebrating trees in all their guises.  All proceeds from the chapbook will go directly to Ancient Forest International, located in Redway, California:

 http://www.ancientforests.org  

 With a startling cover by Tina Negus, the book features over sixty poems by poets from the UK, the US and around the world.  It has been a long time in the making, but the chapbook is now available from publishers, Shadow Poetry, at a cost of $10.00.  (Around £5.00 sterling, depending on exchange rates).  To order, or just to visit the website, click on the following link:

 

http://www.shadowpoetry.com/bookstore/spchapbooks4.html

 

    

PLEASE HELP TO SUPPORT OUR EFFORTS. 

 

The competition was about poems written on behalf of, or in homage to, those masters of the shade, givers of fruit and life and, not forgetting, the paper on which we write – our neglected arboreal friends and companions – the TREES!  We don’t need to tell you that nearly 36 million acres of natural forest is lost each year.  All anyone has to do is look at the area in which they live.  Think of how it looked a century ago, even a decade ago, and how much of the natural landscape of trees has given way to development.  The aim of this competition is to remind people of the importance of trees, not only for their color and beauty, but as a habitat for wildlife, a source of food, medicine and, ultimately, of life. 

 

   

 

Poetree Contest Results

1st Place: Green by Loretta Diane Walker

2nd Place:   Green Man by A C Clarke

3rd Place:  A Love Affair by Andrea Dietrich

 

Top twenty:

*1.   Green by Loretta Diane Walker

*2.   Green Man by A C Clarke

*3.   A Love Affair by Andrea Dietrich

*4.   The Task by Geoff Roberts

*5.   If Trees Could Talk by Neal Wilgus

*6.   Dark Bliss by Sue Bunce

*7.   I am a Tree by Kathy Larson

*8.   The Horse of Shaun by Peter Asher

*9.   Stand Alone Cedar at Hammonasset by Carol Leavitt Altieri

*10. Waggoner’s Well in Summer by Michael Wright

*11. The Mulberry Tree by Shirley Reese

*12. The Tree Rings by Phil Knight

*13. Make of Me a Tree by Henry Newton Goldman

*14. Betula Pendula: The White Goddess Outside My Garden Gate by Etelka Marcel

*15. The Lone White Birch by Brenda B. Sloane

*16. Twig Hangs by Julie Rutherford

*17. Poet Tree in Motion by Joy Campbell

*18. Fossil Grove by A C Clarke   

*19. October Leaves the Trees “Deleaving” by Esther M. Leiper

*20. The Tree Man by Gerald Hampshire

 

* Top twenty will receive a complimentary copy of the chapbook

 

Honorable mentions (in no particular order):

Staverton Thicks by Richard Stewart

Our Almond Tree by Vivien Steels   

An Empty Pair of Shoes by Joyce Walker 

Chawton Park Woods in Autumn by Michael Wright

At the Gates of Heaven by Ursula Studd

Connecticut Summer by Llewelyn H Nicholas

Axe-men by Tina Negus

The Tree by Phil Knight

Fair Cherries by Peter Asher

Treefrog’s Jungle Blues by A C Clarke

In Memoriam – Friday October 16th 1987 by Richard Stewart

Yew Tree at Broadwell by Tina Negus

Norfolk Childhood by Richard Stewart

Autumn Leaves by Julie Rutherford

The Old Apple Tree by Yvonne Sparks

Imagine Just a Heather Moor by June Worsell

Tree Talk by Mavis Gulliver

Hazel Leys by Geoff Williams

Langdyke Bush by Cardinal Cox

The Walnut Tree by Peggy Poole

A Sycamore Survives by Carolyn Constable

Tree by Lynn A. Huber

Sepia Photograph of a Redwood Stump by Suzanne Delaney

At the Gravesite of a Tree by Susan Block

Upright Citizens by Jerri Hardesty

To an Ancient Cottonwood by Lee Enslow

The Melody of Trees by Margaret R. Smith

Timing by Connie Johnson

The Shoe Tree by Betty Lou Hebert

Strip Tease by Carrie Backe

My Tree’s Seasonal Dress by Mary A. Couch

I Found God: Next to a Tree by James Eric Watkins

To the Maples That I Planted by Larry Hand

A Solitary Tree by David LaRue Alexander

Once a Private Porch by Velvet Fackeldey

White Pines by William K. Buckley

Sky Net by Carey Link

Old Trees by Annetta Talbot Beauchamp

City Tree by Nancy Bowman Ballard

Tree of Ages by Jan Turner

 

 

earth love poetry competition

 

 

Please enjoy the following poems from Isabella Strachan, Jack Hastie and Hilary Vance, winners of the 2004 earth love poetry competition.
Tracy Patrick
Editor



SNOW LEOPARD
By Isabella Strachan

She's never seen the yellow Gobi's sands;
a winter cat, born into an enclosure.

The bars would spoil a photograph.
So take a sheet of paper, pencil in
the desert rocks and crags behind her head.
Her coat needs grey and blackest ink
for flank and back and turned-up tail;
white where her softness lies against the snow.

The cold light eyes look round, the small ears twitch.
Briefly, her claws emerge.
She's like a highborn lady from Pekin,
in silk, with porcelain face behind her fan,
sent to a Tartar khan, who keeps
an agile silver dagger next her skin.



WILD BOAR
By Jack Hastie

Visceral grunt, sour-sharp stink
arrest school parties here.

More bear than pig
he roots the dead bark
of his fenced pen
round and about, about, about
impatient, following the satellite dish
of his nose.

He raises his enormous, bristling face
and peers shortly
through tiny slit-shut eyes;
then busies himself again
muttering and mumbling angrily
among coke cans and crisp packets.

In dreams
he is bold in his lair
swerving at bay
to scatter scraps of dogs, yelping
tusked to the bone.

Once
by flaring torchlight
in a cavern in the Dordogne
they blazed him out in ochre
burnt red beside aurochs and mammoth;
one of the gods of the place.

 



VELVET CRIMINAL
By Hilary Vance

Her silhouette ponders for a
moment.
Lightening splash, silk spray,
fast flash of rainbow scales.
She flips and turns, paws printing
the stones, smoothes the air with a
tail-twitch. Fish flaps, ripples reside.
Summery breezes lead to the fields.
Soft eyes wait.
Suddenly she springs. Many times,
struggles and shakes.

The last to return, through
the open window, velvet,
golden-eyed, purrs under a
stroking hand and curls into a
tight ball. Sleeps into oblivion.
Guiltless, always forgiven.

  

earth love, PO Box 11219, Paisley, PA1 2WH
Please remember to include SAE when submitting poems.