REGIONAL FINALS: 4-toll vs. 11-stigma

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The Poets’ Challenge: Each poet is assigned a single word based on their bracket seed, ranging from 1 (intuitive) to 16 (seemingly impossible). Poets must write a kid-appropriate poem using the prompted word in under 36 hours. Once both final poems have been received, they will be pasted into the body of this post, and then the reader poll will be open for voting.

Voter Instructions: Read each poem as many times as you’d like. Then use the poll to express your preference. Votes are counted in real time and cannot be changed once entered. As a guideline for voting, consider the criteria on which the contestants on the cooking show “Chopped” are evaluated: presentation, taste, and creativity. Translated roughly into poetry terms, presentation might include technical aspects such as meter, rhyme, form/shape, etc.; taste might be the net effect — did the poem move you to laugh, cry, think, kill, etc.; and creativity might include the poet’s approach toward a certain subject, image evocation, clever wordplay, etc.

“This is awesome, where can I find more?”: All results and scheduled matchups, including a glance at the round-by-round writing windows and voting windows, are visible from the Live Scoreboard page. In addition, results will be tweeted from @edecaria as they become final.

Here are the poems:

4-toll
For Those Who Toll the Bells
by Greg Pincus

Come hear the sad story of two poor, shy men
Who rang bells at a church in the shire.
The two men were twins though that fact was unknown
Since they lived out of sight in the spire.

The church bells were old, and their clappers were gone,
Yet the men loved their job heart and soul…
They would run towards the bells, always going face first:
The collisions would make the bells toll.

One day one poor brother was running full speed
When he slipped, and he tripped, then he fell!
He died on the ground, and though none knew his name,
All felt sure that his face rang a bell.

The very next hour, the other twin died,
Like his brother, his name known by none.
“But they sure are dead ringers,” the townspeople said…
So the brothers were buried as one.

vs.

11-stigma
SAFFRON HARVEST
by Mary Lee Hahn

The blooming field
is a purple sea.

Closer
you see rows.

Bent over, I focus
on each crocus.

For 50 millennia,
the three-part stigma —

threads of yellow,
golden glow,

–has been harvested by hand,
bloom by bloom, plant by plant.

Priceless
spice.

VOTE NOW!

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GET OUT THE VOTE. The average pairing in Round 1 generated 154 votes. The average pairing in Round 2 generated 178 votes. The average pairing in Round 3 generated 224 votes. A nice trend! Use the share buttons below and mention the madness wherever you go so that these poems reach more kids! And remember, encourage voting on EVERY MATCHUP, not just this one!