First Place – 2022 Beverly Hopkins Contest for High School Students

“This poem is an adventure, journeying to a North where it’s paradoxically warmer, and traveling inward to a place where the speaker discovers that her own broken bones are strengthened by fracture. I loved the marvelous physicality and unexpected specificity of the ‘rice and cloves and scrap metal’ that the poet packs into her bags of this quiet quest. But what ultimately draws me to follow this wanderer is her mysterious and magical sense of purpose: ‘My snow turns to rain, / So I will go as if it is all I have ever wanted.'”

Srikanth Reddy, 2022 Hopkins Contest Judge

Up North

by TENLEY HALL
Clayton High School

I’m going up North to where it’s warmer.
My skin is see-through and my bones are cracked and stronger.
I have bags and they are heavy
And I fill them with rice and cloves and scrap metal.
I wonder if the restaurants there will smell as buttery.
I’m going East to the bay,
The ocean.
I know that fish smell bad so I do not eat them
And the Mississippi is too muddy.
Let me go, let me arrive.
Let me sink my hands down,
Let me sit on their lawns,
Let me rip out the grass,
Let me be the familiar one that reminds them of the stars.
Let me be new, let me be fresh,
The unexpected Northern warm,
The air by the sea turned to froth.
I’m going to a new oldest place with my very own feet
       that aren’t as young as yesterday.
My hair is thick and frail and it gets in my eyes
        so I can say it is scented like the lilies who do not
        know, do not care.
This is my end and the seconds before
I am the person I am embarrassed by,
     who I cannot recognize, who I miss.
The water is different and it is thick and it cleanses me.
My snow turns to rain,
So I will go as if it is all I have ever wanted.
Up North to where it’s warmer.
My skin is see-through and my bones are cracked and stronger.

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