The Year I Get Published.

I have kept to do lists for a lot of years. "Submit poetry" is one item that has remained on that list for the past 8, never being crossed off or completed. So with this blog it begins. I recently declared to a friend that this is the year I will get published. Maybe I won't. Either way I'm going to keep track of my attempts. I'm going to keep track of some other items too...but more posts on that later.  

The evening of 12.21 (submissions due 12.22) I found my first place to submit some words, the Poetry Society of America. They have annual awards of all kinds for different reasons supported by different people for different prizes and all that. I submitted 4 poems to the George Bogin Memorial Award, "...to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms." You should know that George Bogin was a poet, died when I was 6, and was a supporter of human rights and the like. Here is one of my submissions:

Jim Crow for Sheriff 
 
I wonder if Mr. Rice was proud,
pleased he danced on the hearts of "freedmen,"
proud he set the first example for Nuremberg,
pleased he danced on the hearts of the hungry.

I feel the Great Migration in my bones,
I see the left over campaigns of the Crow,
I hurt for the children of God that helped raise us all.

Two cheers for the Poor Peoples Campaign,
Twelve hundred sorries for all the bloody Sundays.

 I'll let you know in March how it went.