Valley poets earn kudos

The Scotts Valley Arts Commission has announced the winners of its annual poetry contest, Verses in the Valley.
The teachers of children who won the contest received a $50 honorarium from the Kiwanis Club of Scotts Valley.
The following poems were read in front of the Scotts Valley City Council on June 16.
Kindergarten to third grade
“Peace” by Luka Cheney
Peace in the world is my wish
Each person in the world should care for each other
And stop fighting and coexist with another
Come together as children of God:
Every race, every nation, and every one of us
**Second place: “Water” by Owen Scott
**Third place: “Spring Animals” by Ethan Truner-Garnette
Fourth and fifth grades
“The Big Desert” by Alex Jackson
I’m the desert
With my pumpkin plains
My violent waves of wind blow through the Joshua trees
With their twisted arms.
The thunder clouds sting the sun-baked ground.
A pack of wolves howl on the limestone cliffs.
Seasons change and the winter is here.
The prickled cactus dies out.
Soon the cold mountains are capped with snow.
Spring came soon, the desert became calm.
The storms go and all that is left is the golden desert.
**Second place: “The Mountains, So Elegant” by Kailin Ivey
**Third place: “The War” by Claire Tershey
Sixth through eighth grades
“Living Cell Poem” by Jacqui Fortune
Listen to the story that I tell
It’s a poem of a living cell
All the animals, plants, people too
Have different cells with different jobs to do
The organelle gives the orders — kind of like a brain
And it’s protected by the strong membrane
There’s only one way to describe the nucleus
Miracles!
Around the cell, you’ll find its skin
The cell wall holds the cell in
But its job isn’t easy there’s no doubt;
It lets some substance go in and out.
And don’t forget the ribosome —
That is where proteins come from.
These protein machines are so small, you’ll see
you need an electron microscope for you to agree
Last of all, but not the very least,
Mitochondria — mighty organelle beasts,
since they turn energy into food so well,
we call them the powerhouse of the cell.
Now my friend, you know it well,
the unforgettable story of the living cells.
**Second place: “I Am…” by Marissa Shaffer
High school
“The Word” by Jonathan Powell
Never silent is the word,
And through the word all is heard.
All the lies that should never be,
But all of them are all set free.
The word has hurt everyone,
And never cares about what it’s done.
It’s hurt you and me in everyway,
Because man is its only prey.
It stalks around and never stops,
And grows like weeds in withering crops.
Its cruelty knows little bounds,
And everybody’s heart it has found.
Whether good or bad the word is never silent,
And few to none stand to fight it.
Best adult poem
“Faith” by Nancy Hoffman
As if she were my own child,
I anxiously watch the nurses take
Her blood sugar reading,
Tie the thin blue straps of her open-backed gown
Into a hard lumpy bow,
Check the IV tubes, and
Shift her onto the waiting gurney.
Her face is a pale bouquet of lilies,
Eyes tightly shut against the glare
Of the fluorescent lights overhead.
She lies still, waiting.
Eventually the journey begins:
Her bed is rolled along floors
That shine like becalmed seas.
The yawning doors click open,
Then shut quickly and
She is swallowed into the early morning
Like Jonah into the whale.
For her, it is unfamiliar.
Like birth, she will emerge forever changed,
Given the gift of original vision long-deprived.
The nurses’ voices are soft as cashmere
When she awakens. None of us here
Know what miracle just happened.
And like Jonah, she has been spat back out
Onto dry land of a new world,
Hoping God is somewhere nearby.
Best class poem
“Sea Storm” by Linda Muehlhauser’s fourth-grade class at Brook Knoll Elementary School
The foamy water rushes against the rock
and the dark blue-green waves crash.
The water is a cloud on a sandy shore.
The waves are beating up the land.
The dark blue sky is like waves of Caribbean.
The sky is angry today.
Rock disappears under the endless waves.
The clouds hurry to finish.
The sun has come to dawn
while the water is licking the sky.
The sky has stopped crying.
The moaning and screeching waves have stopped.
The waves are like a kitten scratching around.
The rock smiles.