WHS senior wins prize in state poetry competition

Westlake High School senior Alison Gray won the second place poetry award in the 2010 Ohioana Robert Fox Award for Young Writers contest. The award will be presented Saturday, May 8, during the opening of the 4th annual Ohioana Book Festival: Celebrating Ohio’s Authors in Columbus. Ohio’s first lady Frances Strickland will open the festival. Gray will read her wining entry, “Repeated Extinction,” at the festival.   

Repeated Extinction 

Out of Kaleidoscopic Chaos our Gaea egressed,
With verdant vines and towering trees overlooking
Blue-gray tides that curl like the toes of a newborn child—
A silent soundlessness wrapped the earth in a blanket and the crib mobile spun hypnotically.
Darkness.
Tyrannical lizards tangoed through forests, and raptors darted through wildwood,
Flickering their tongues and fanning their crowns.  Yellow eyes bid death to onlookers.
Fireballs flew—
Eruptions of Chrome—
Copper—
Brass— Left silvery snowcaps and ashen fossils.
Hulky mammoths gumshoed through snowdrifts as crystal cyclones groaned;
Cave dwellers glittered homey heat from charred wood,
And from this primitivism budded all-powerful Rome:
Gory gladiators presided in status and heroes emerged: Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus, Jason.
Dumbfounding aqueducts rose as Roman battles echoed nonchalance.
The Germanic people germinated; Dark ages depressed the natives but the Renaissance rebirth
Was a gleaming door, bringing stories in paintings and paintings in stories.
Colonization of a new world crowded cramped ships,
Disease and arbitrary dishonesty banished the inhabitants,
And bloodthirsty war tore through the already divvied continents.
Flower children of free spirit professed protest,
Though a frigid war ensued, and red was still as scary as blood.
Spaceships and computers and calculators began the modern man;
Now lightweight laptops, fancy phones, and ipods welded to fragile ears
Make it silent! Here.
Soundlessness wraps the earth in a blanket,
Snug and motionless,
Letting her dream reveries and nightmares,
All over again.