Richard B. Mowry
First Prize in Category 1: 2009 Christian Publishers Poetry Prize $300
About this Christian Poet:
Richard B. Mowry was born and raised in St. Marys PA, and later graduated from both Grove City College (1956) and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (1959). Subsequent to his education he served nearly 40 years as a Presbyterian pastor in the Pittsburgh area. With his wife, Barbara, he has two children and six grandchildren. Upon retirement the Mowrys moved to The Villages in central Florida where he rekindled his passion for writing poetry.
Because so much modern poetry is written in free verse Mr. Mowry feels called to a puristic loyalty to traditional rhyme and meter reflecting the style of Robert Frost. His poems usually center on nature or rural settings, always with a multi-level philosophical or spiritual point of view.
His hobbies include tennis, piano, reading and traveling. Most of all however, Richard Mowry is drawn to poetry, which he says is not a chore so much as a drive for self-expression. His latest book of poetry; Times and Seasons of His Handiwork has been accepted as an entry for the 2010 Pulitzer in the category of original verse.
A Country Graveyard
An album filled with memories… it was an Easter day
we walked that rural road at dusk and saw along the way
the benediction's setting sun… the vision was sublime
enough to aim your camera there and freeze that frame of time.
A setting sun beyond a graveyard scattered on a hill
is boxed inside this photograph with history standing still.
While stopping on that rural road, why was this picture taken
of solar setting at a place so lonely and forsaken?
This rustic sanctum of the dead in sight of setting sun
portrays the grave as the only goal we claim when day is done.
Those roses by a grave where seeds once buried in a hole,
do sprouting stems of spring suggest the flowering of the soul?
'Twas seven years ago we walked the aisles between those rocks
lined like soldiers in formation, then saw the stone that talks
with names of passing people who were swallowed by the earth,
but only brief biographies… the date of death and birth.
A garden of rock with sun set souls while sun set in the west…
or was it rising in the east, for pictures can't suggest
if it was dawn or dusk that day… tell me in my forgetting
was sun upon horizon rising that I assume was setting?
I bask in glory at the dawn of resurrected sun
to celebrate the victory that another Son had won,
for was it on that Easter morn they saw the empty tomb
while ember Easter egg of dawn was rising from the womb?
Copyright ©2009 by Richard B. Mowry