Samuel Binns is the 2014 Poet Laureate of the Spadra Valley.
Samuel Binns was named 2014 Poet Laureate of the Spadra Valley.
The English major from Hot Springs, Ark., took home the top honors in the finale of season nine of project Poet, held Tuesday night in front of a crowd of 150 fellow students in the MacLean Residence Hall. The final competition of the season included poems about God, nature, love and America.
Binns, who won three of the five weekly challenges this season, not only won the title of Poet Laureate of the Spadra Valley, but he also secured the $1,000 top prize. Utah Robertson finished second, Daniel Garcia was third, Sandra Davis finished fourth and Amanda Rushing was fifth. The top five finishers all received prize money.
Here are Binns’ winning entries:*
Nature’s Nirvana
Mother Earth, the Buddha, begins to bud
As she awakens from Her monochrome slumber.
Her chromatic thoughts are not static;
The rainbow river flows forever.
Young and innocent flowers flourish,
Dancing with the gentle joy of being alive.
The blossoms of bliss kiss the sun,
Springing upward to the sky.
The youth are stowing for the future,
Growing and going to distant lands.
They follow their cloudless dreams,
Spending more time yearning than learning.
The trees transform, and green becomes gold.
The climbers have changed; friendships fall,
and they agree to not rustle with regret.
The leaves leave their home to find what’s within.
Mother Nature’s solitude shivers in the shade,
meditating while grey skies shield the warmth.
She surrenders to the fortress of frost
and hibernates until it’s time to be born again.
Wake Up
"Out of many, one"
Should be "Out of many, none"
Inequality
Flip a dollar bill,
And you’ll see "In God We Trust"
Money is their god
The United States
Has countless causes to change,
But there is still hope.
Astronauts showed that
American ambition
Goes beyond the sky.
1% owns all
Except happiness, the true
American Dream
We’re all dreamers?
If we want Utopia,
We have to wake up.
We must try harder to change; we must try harder.
We must try; we must.
Warmth
Love begins when flint first strikes steel,
Sprinkling a shower of sparks on top of wood.
The flame takes time; dousing it in gasoline
Will only cause the flame to fade faster.
Love is tender, so one must gather tinder.
Light the match, and if the hearts are a good match,
Then the sparks come together and ignite?
The fearful flame will flicker, but love will not extinguish.
Arguments and obstacles create plumes of smoke,
But love expels oxygen to feed the fire.
When it’s alive, love does not neglect the fire.
It would not survive, nor would it grow higher.
Contain the flame; prevent the blaze from fazing,
so desire will not wind itself around the fire like a hungry serpent,
Smoldering in a tomb of fumes with shrouds of black clouds.
Love does not scorch or depart; love ignites and warms the cool heart.
Tabula Rasa
In the beginning, God created the canvas and painted light
Upon the varying degrees of darkness and fallen shadows.
The Renaissance Man formed the Vitruvian man from dust,
Breathing life into the perfect geometrical form of his body.
Like Cezanne, He breathes life into every still-life.
On the seventh day, He resembled the relieved Rembrandt.
He later paints The Scream, feeling our pain and fright,
And He will weep before we sleep when He paints a starry night.
He does not give us clear answers to our questions,
But like cubism, He reveals a concealed figure within the abstraction.
He wields the existential energy of Jackson Pollock,
Bestowing the slowly flowing free will.
He pours and drips the paint on the drops of existence,
Tracing the space of the world around us and the world within us.
Pollock’s paintings have no beginning or end,
And nor do the paintings of the Alpha and the Omega.
God painted mankind in His own image,
Hanging each masterpiece in The Museum,
A sacred sanctuary of His divine design.
Some choose not to view the gallery,
Despite its free admission.
And some, when they look at His self-portrait,
See nothing but a blank canvas.
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