{"id":22932,"date":"2025-05-20T14:25:20","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T21:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/?page_id=22932"},"modified":"2025-05-20T14:26:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T21:26:50","slug":"2025-peter-sears-poetry-prize-winner","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/2025-peter-sears-poetry-prize-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 Peter Sears Poetry Prize winner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guthrie Romas “<\/strong>Spending Time with an Old Man in Bellingham”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

People felt that Talvi, the old Fin,<\/p>\n

ought to be theirs.<\/p>\n

He stands,<\/p>\n

squinting at the<\/p>\n

little lint folds of murre birds<\/p>\n

clustered on a shelf above the sea.<\/p>\n

Unwrapping greasy wool<\/p>\n

cable scarves,<\/p>\n

he swims in the ocean every morning,<\/p>\n

before anyone wakes up,<\/p>\n

gets scolded by neighbors,<\/p>\n

for being so old,<\/p>\n

and alive.<\/p>\n

How foolish of me!<\/em>\u00a0He laughs,<\/p>\n

scuffing in<\/p>\n

from the fog.<\/p>\n

He reads\u00a0National Geographic<\/em>,<\/p>\n

and likes dirty jokes,<\/p>\n

keeps coffee cans of rain on his porch.<\/p>\n

One cold night over tea<\/p>\n

and the Salish sea, he told me<\/p>\n

he never married his love Onerva,<\/p>\n

whose name meant<\/p>\n

grass that grows under the field after<\/em><\/p>\n

harvest.<\/em><\/p>\n

She walked off a dock,<\/p>\n

and stayed down there.<\/p>\n

They were 19.<\/p>\n

His latest pleasure\u2014<\/p>\n

to lay in the thronging night,<\/p>\n

imagining he is the unswayable moon,<\/p>\n

pulling the water home<\/p>\n

until morning.<\/p>\n

We had finished the tea,<\/p>\n

mugs adjoined off kilter on the wire table.<\/p>\n

He said,<\/p>\n

Winter is dying,<\/em><\/p>\n

has lost its way home<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Then he smiled,<\/p>\n

small, sharp,<\/p>\n

just a flicker,<\/p>\n

something unreadable in it,<\/p>\n

a strange dog that lets you scratch its head,<\/p>\n

but doesn\u2019t belong to you.<\/p>\n

I drove four hours south through the flood-<\/p>\n

lit dark, highway under gale and wave,<\/p>\n

something always behind me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guthrie Romas “Spending Time with an Old Man in Bellingham” \u00a0 People felt that Talvi, the old Fin, ought to be theirs. He stands, squinting at the little lint folds of murre birds clustered on a shelf above the sea. Unwrapping greasy wool cable scarves, he swims in the ocean every morning, before anyone wakes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1424,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-22932","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1424"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22932"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22936,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22932\/revisions\/22936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}