Congratulations to the Finalists and Winners
of CLA’s 2025 Sacred Poetry Contest!

This year’s finalists are: Emma Atkinson, Jeffrey Essman, Elisa Garza, Johanna Hall, Maura Harrison, Katie Hartsock, Stephan Kramp, Gail Lawler, Adrian Lenthall, Marjorie Maddox, Sheila Murray-Nellis, Michael Ortiz, Theresa Pihl, Julia Rocchi, Andrea-Kelly Rosenberg, Geoffrey Smagacz, Lindsay Tsohartaridis, Leslie Williams, Megan Willome, and Stephen A. Wozny.

We encourage you to join us for the Virtual Celebration of Winners and Finalists with judge Sally Reed, on Monday, May 5, 2025, 7:00 p.m. CST. Please register at this link to attend.

Please read the winning entries below.

First Place: Michael Ortiz
Second Place: Leslie Williams
Third Place: Emma Atkinson

Honorable Mention: Johanna Hall, Gail Lawler, and Julia Rocchi.

Honorable Mention Awards

The Honorable Mention designation is given to poems of exceptional merit. This year’s Honorable Mentions are awarded to poets Johanna Hall, Gail Lawler, and Julia Rocchi.

Honorable Mention
Johanna Hall

Choreía
after Compassion (1897),
William Adolphe Bouguereau

Our feet—the ones not nailed down—
are almost in third position.

The lord of this dance,
thorn-crowned, lopsided, is
the centerstage we all
lean into.

Cheek pressed against
bloodstained loincloth,
the smell iron-sweet and sweaty.

We flicker in and out of the scene,
attempting to dig our heels in,
to hold his cross up with ours,
to lean our cross on his.

Every time and place
dons the same bare feet
and circles around

a God compassionate enough
to bleed on our grasping fingers.

Somewhere, the dead are being raised.
Somewhere, a soldier goes home and washes his hands

Second Place
Leslie Williams

Large Garden in a Small Frame
after St. John the Baptist in Meditation – Hieronymus Bosch

We don’t know who commissioned it,
an oil on 16 x 19 wooden board.
The unknown patron’s praying figure later
painted over, obscured by a Boschian
plant: the dominating dewy goblet
dangling from a thorny branch, its broken
skin spilling seeds for birds to feast on—but
no, that sparrow’s overdosed, this one’s
perishing from abstention. What if seeds
of inattention are themselves a kind
of poison? Maybe it’s not a pomegranate
but a study of the inner eye (the birds,
their eggs, the two mayflies, brief life
where we get tangled musing over fanciful
pursuits). If you follow the simple finger
pointing to foregrounded lamb, then
you also see the slab, the mandrake root—
the generative Christ of whom John muses
comes to cover us, as persons overpainted
by the broken fruit.

Meet Our Final Judge

Sally Read is editor of Word on Fire’s 100 Great Catholic Poems and an award-winning poet in her own right. Her first collection since her conversion from atheism to Catholicism, Dawn of this Hunger, was the fruit of her time as poet in residence at the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs. Sally’s poetry has been recorded for the UK’s Poetry Archive, and her writing, in both poetry and prose, has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Picador Book of Love Poems, and Forward’s Poems of the Decade.

Sally has written lyrics for the sacred music of Paul Flynn, and their songs have been performed by The Palestrina and Trinity College Chapel Choirs in Dublin. Her memoir Night’s Bright Darkness recounts her conversion, and her following book, Annunciation: A Call to Faith in a Broken World, was the subject of a short film by Norman Servais for EWTN Great Britain. Sally’s literary memoir, The Mary Pages, is newly released from Word on Fire.

More information can be found at www.sallyread.net.

Honorable Mention
Gail Lawler

The Shepherdess
after Sainte Genevieve - Charles Sprague Pearce

I am not the girl in the gold-leaf stories,
not the porcelain saint with lips pressed shut,
not the soft thing carved into the bones of stained glass.
I am the mud-caked prayer of a city that does not know
it needs saving yet.

The sky has folded itself into warning,
a smudge of storm-breath curling over rooftops,
the wolves wear the faces of men,
and I—threadbare in the shape of a woman—
stand between the teeth of the world and the people who sleep.

My hands are red with the weight of work,
knuckles chapped from kneeling in fields,
from gathering wheat when the winds would rather steal it.
Faith is not found in the silk of a hymn,
but in the way you hold the land together
when the earth cracks beneath it.

Behind me, the sheep watch with dark, knowing eyes,
pressed against each other in a hush of wool and breath.
They have seen what comes when men grow hungry,
when steel and fire break the fields,
when mercy is something only whispered.
They do not run.

I have always been more shepherd than saint,
more hands in the dirt than hands folded in prayer,
but they follow me all the same—
as if they know I would bleed before I let them be taken.

They say I dream in voices,
that the sky spills secrets into my ears—
but I know the sound of hunger,
I have heard the bellies of children growl like famine,
have held the dying long enough to learn
that not all prayers are answered with ease.

Still, I walk the roads,
a single flicker of wool and grit,
a shield made of stubbornness and something divine.

And when they look at me,
they do not see a saint.

They see a woman,
aching and alive,
hands empty of weapons but full of light,
and they do not know yet—
not yet—

that it is enough.

Honorable Mention
Julia Rocchi

BONES
after Sainte Genevieve - Charles Sprague Pearce

Long before they put your bones on trial,
You plant them in your muddy, patchworked fields
And tune your spirit—prescient dial—
To mystic frequencies that promise yields
Beyond the rib-bared barns and ochre ewes.
Most of the world looks to evade decay.
How revolutionary, then, you choose
To stand in welcome of such disarray.
I pray: Protect her peace. The buttressed stones
You’ll save have yet to rise and fall, their sutures
Beyond mending, not unlike your bones—
Fragments of the past that seek their futures.
Keep heeding from your marrow, though decried
By those whose faith has long since ossified.

Third Place
Emma Atkinson

Geneviève
after Sainte Genevieve - Charles Sprague Pearce

Love-in-a-mist in summer looks as she does
Now, rooted to this pastureland, head flung
Back in a softer vision—old, or young,
As any wildflower ever was.

Her cheeks, reddened by the winter air,
Recall wool steeped in fleurs de garance. Patched
And worn, her skirt and frock evoke the thatched
Hamlets and sparse blue fields of Nanterre.

Two sheep have raised their heads, sensing perhaps
Whatever’s on the wind that’s made her grow
So still. The land and all within will know
What heaven’s spoken here as years elapse.

For now, she is just this: a saint in seed,
A flower some might take for a common weed.

Comments on “Geneviève” by Judge Sally Read

There were many accomplished sonnets submitted, but this one stood out for me, partly because of its simplicity: its unforced meter and rhyme allow the images and themes to shine within the confines of the form. The poet has truly engaged with the painting. Not only does she note details like St Genevieve’s posture and complexion, they draw out the poetry within the painting: the way that the blue of the saint’s patched pockets evoke the latent blue of the fields, and muted colors of surrounding buildings. The simplicity of the piece makes the observation in stanza three all the more remarkable: an observer of the painting could easily miss the two sheep who have raised their heads in response to something. It takes an adroit lover of art, and a fine poet, to connect the two: the sheep’s piqued senses and whatever it is that has come over the saint in her pastoral rapture. The enjambment of “grow/So still” gives further weight to the idea of Genevieve as a flower, while emphasizing her otherworldly motionlessness. The poet also gives us a quiet vision of nature as a participant in grace and redemption. And the final couplet doesn’t shun the obviousness of a final couplet, but fully embraces the philosophical neatness of the form.

Comments on “Large Garden in a Small Place” by Judge Sally Read

I couldn’t resist this poem. It’s a Boschian take on Bosch, which is a marvel. The poet takes a detail of the history of the painting and weaves it into a compelling interpretation: in the sublime madness of Bosch’s art, the patron has been painted over, just as, the poet suggests, we’re covered by Christ the Lamb to whom John the Baptist is pointing. It’s an insouciant connection that’s supported by the metaphysical progress of the description: seeds as inattention, pomegranate as an inner eye; how we’re constantly distracted. This kind of shape-shifting and hallucinogenic patterning is, of course, very evocative of Bosch’s work, and that’s why the poem seems to me to be an excellent companion to it. In its quest for likenesses and connections, it’s fitting that the poem’s form is instinctive in its line-breaks, and that it’s decked with the aural associations of assonance--and that lovely imperfect rhyme of “abstention” and “inattention”. The rhymes of “root” and “fruit” in the final four lines give a sense of completion on what has been a wild ride of a poem.  A sharp eye for detail, an original explication of  the painting’s meaning, as well as an alert and vivid use of language, are what set this piece apart. The reader won’t look at the painting in the same way once they’ve read this poem—and that is one of the traits of good ekphrastic poetry.

First Place
Michael Ortiz

Spring’s Fist

Hieronimo Speaks:

“More than usual spring hit me, a fist
unfolding its favorite word-trysts

so many times I swear I was in a sea
of seeds bursting through darkness,

punching open coffin lids, miracles
of leaf, bark, twig, bug spiracles,

like mantles flung in a hooray
off one’s shoulders, falling first

like a page falls to rise again in light,
now a hill of triumph, bright

witness to April’s riot, splayed
roots, a voice finding pitch or hum.

(O Word in the words like fireflies
twirl in the wands of our desire.)

This perfect pitch has been my strife:
I stare at each page and see in shadow

leaves tangled in wry senses hidden
from me, reluctant to rise but bidden

by his words, to the wreaths
of praise encircling days and days.

His language is pollen, kernel, seed,
coaxed in silence, breeding

brows furrowing across each page,
angels laugh at my hook swiping

the air, rounds for a widow’s mite,
the clutch and hug of the light.”

Comments on “Spring’s Fist” by Judge Sally Read    

I was captivated by the energy and innovation of this poem. I admit that, at first, I was dubious about the poem’s true relation to the painting! But the impetus and invention of this piece won me over—and it does spring, in convincing and intriguing ways, from the light in Armusik’s work of chiaroscuro. While the painting is mostly darkness, St Jerome’s face and page are illuminated—we aren’t shown by what—and this is what the poem explores, in poetic fashion. In imagistic couplets, an abundant bunch of which rhyme, the poet takes us on a metaphysical journey, imagining the translation of Scripture as a season with its seeds, bugs and voluptuous growths. Translators will know their intimacy with the original text, and we know that Jerome was scrupulous in his desire to give us the best translation that he could of Scripture. We see his inspiration and passionate searching in this poem’s vivid language, with its unspooling metaphors and light allusion to the Gospels. In terms of technical prowess, it’s to the poet’s great credit that he did not pursue rhyming couplets throughout, which would have tamed the piece and made it more obvious. The music appears to have a life of its own—slipping into rhyme at energetic peaks, its urgency falling into enjambment, alliteration and assonance. I loved this new take on an old theme.