Winners of the Robert Burns Poetry Award:
Terry Semple Memorial Contest - 2000

"The Greening of America" by James B. Johnston
 

Skeletal shadows haunt hillsides silent of song.
Sunken eyes stare sightless across famine fields.
Stinking potatoes permeate the odor of death.

The flux of bloody fever flows from tumbled cottages
Like the tide of ragged remnants flooding the roadside,
Abandoning ditch-dead without ritual or wake.

The human freight of coffin ships sail west
To where the fungus forged its first black root.