December’s Timeskip
Poetry by Parker K.
9th-12th GRADE WINNER FOR SPRING 2025 POETRY CONTEST. Prompt: All submissions must be in the form of a Golden Shovel. A golden shovel is a poem that uses lines from another poem (or song lyric, or other quoted text) as the end words for each line, as found text that anchors and often provides inspiration for the new poem. Originally created by poet Terrance Hayes, the first golden shovel used Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” down the right side of the poem. Think of it as a kind of acrostic poem, but using full words at the end of lines!
— after “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths
these days it seems like the weeks go so
fast that they can’t count for
anything — that once
the oblivion settled and the cold came in
time rewound itself faster than my
body could handle, holding on for dear life
we cling to hope and say, just once, let
someone look kindly on me
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me with scraped hands digging past the gray to get
at some warm relief, burying what
is left of me in the shallow snow — I
will pass under the railways and want
and want and want and Lord
is there anyone left alive who knows
how to get past it?
in the end, does it matter what we would
do with ourselves? we can only hope the winter be
something more than the open sky and the
next city bus — if December left us unchanged, it would be the first
time
Note from the judge: With evocative language and the textures of winter, “December’s Timeskip” profoundly explores the shapeshiftiness of time.
