Poetry Nation and Eber & Wein Publishing are pleased to award 1st Place honors to Alex Diaz for his poem “La Bendición.”
I see scored olive branches coiling themselves
around my hand, gripping more tightly as
my eyes narrow their escape.
My lips move in lockstep with my hands and submit
to the martyrdom of speaking life into
the one man I’ve ever prayed dead.
I give a eulogy of a greeting before a
mass of passing ghosts
as I molest my memory with images unharmed
in the making of his exhibition.
And then we walk home in silence,
his mouth roiled with pride and
my mind turbid with disgust—
my words ruminated and his words vomited.
Those walks home are always the longest
because my prayers only reach the church
after I make it past the scaffolding,
and he turns around to see that
God has left my face
and my prayers have left my body
just as his prayers have left his mouth
to tell me “I love you” and he realizes
we’ve long stopped whispering the same religion.
In his grand prize-winning poem, Alex Diaz eloquently combines vivid imagery, layered metaphor, and emotional complexity to convey a deeply personal and tense experience. The free verse style in which he writes is part of what makes it so compelling, because the lack of a fixed meter or rhyme scheme mirrors the rawness and unpredictability of the emotions it describes.
The poem came to light after running into his father on his way home, feeling worse with each greeting because he’s “convincingly practicing forgiveness with someone who’s never rehearsed repentance for me.” Diaz further explains, “The poem is about the guilt of knowing he feels like he’s getting somewhere while I’m silently quitting on him, as the church slowly comes into view from under the scaffolding before our building.”
After journaling daily for two years, Diaz returned to poetry to “feel the things I’d compulsively ‘solved.’” His chief goal when writing poetry is “to feel in plain English. I feel it’s a personal failure when I have to lean on esotericism, and a sign that my feelings are unripe. The more I dress up my words, the harder it is to recall my memories,” he admits.
Diaz has been writing poetry “committedly” since 2022, drawing inspiration from numerous famous and accomplished poets. He imparts learning brevity from Earnest Hemingway’s six-word story, honesty from Jai Mohammed, freeform from William Evans’s “Still Can’t Do My Daughter’s Hair,” and graceful abandon from Nayyirah Waheed’s “Nejma.”
“I’ve barely written this year because I’m evolving from shame and grief to empathy and forgiveness, which means I barely have the words for how I now feel. I believe the hardest thing to do after an ego death is to change your emotional fuel source because it means restarting and failing in love again.”
In the meantime, Diaz has enjoyed teaching and being an uncle because “It’s allowed me to revisit my childhood and heal with new answers for whoever might need them. Life is great right now and waking up is the best part!”
Congratulations to Alex and all of the 2nd and 3rd place winners!
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE COMPLETE LIST OF WINNERS
We greatly appreciate the patience and understanding of our contestants as they await these contest results. Because this is a free contest, we receive tens of thousands of contest entries. Approximately 50% of the entrants make it through to our semi-final round. This round of judging is a monumental task for our judging panel, as they do read each and every poem, sometimes more than once. While the process is time-consuming, it is conducted in a fair, unrushed manner by our editorial department.