We will now proudly announce the winner of this year’s edition of the Hamingja Foundation’s prestigious poetry competition. But first we want to take the opportunity to thank all of you who participated and contributed with great texts! It’s a brave thing to do, and we all needed this competition to get going with writing new ‘songs’ – perhaps the most important thing we can do to find our way back to the natural ways. The three members of the jury also said they were impressed with all texts – a good grade considering that all of them are poets themselves, and also well acquainted with the field we’re writing in.
It was a completely unanimous decision – the jury had to read and pick a winner totally on their own before checking with the others and ‘sum up’. All of them had picked the same text independently of each other.
The winner of the Weaver Award 2023 is our member Juniper Pearl! The jury’s motivation is that this is a very personal and beautifully written text that truly says something about life, and that touches them personally, and does so with a narrative that sucks them in completely.
Here below you can read the poem:
The question of every young lad
What will make a man complete? A man has his strength
A man has his courage
A man has his bravery
Yet, is this is all he is?
That should be all which is needed
He thinks But then
A gentle voice whispers in his ear
There is more still
A thousand wild hunts
A thousand wolf hides
A thousand gallons of blood for the altar
Will not a completed man make
More? Frustratingly he wonders
What more must he prove?
What tests are yet to come?
How is he not complete?
He needs For his completion
A wife,
A woman
A fertile vessel
For what is the sky father without the mother earth?
Just like man with his strength, courage, and bravery
Dyēus Pater Brings radiance
Brings durability
Brings order Indeed his promise to retrieve the world from darkness
Is fulfilled each dawn as he illuminates the world
But what good is order in a vast emptiness?
In the eternally sprawling void,
The expansive nothingness
Pregnant with all life’s potential
Spring forth from within the earthen mother must
From the light springs the earth
From the rain springs the crop
From the mysterious union of man and his wife
Springs forth the child
Their hamingja contained within
But how will he pass this final test
This seemingly insurmountable challenge?
He wonders
A thousand wild hunts
A thousand wolf hides
A thousand gallons of blood for the altar
Will seem like mere childhood games
To woo
To court
To entreat
The reddened fruit giver
The wife
The woman
The fertile vessel
How does one do that
oh how does a man bend his might to hers?
He inquires within
With trust and honor, yes.
With constancy and valor, yes
But more than that
The voice slowly speaks
He needs to
He must
Soften
Does not the mighty sky father know when to soften
When to bend and give way
To the gentle rains of renewal each spring?
Yes renewing waters he sends
Gentle, tender mists and fogs
Sprinkles and drizzles
Which dance upon the mother’s hardened earth.
Drizzles to rain
Which penetrate and permeate
Moistening and nourishing her frozen face
Reawakening, she sprouts leaves and flowers
Grains and fruit
So too must man bend and give way
Shower his beloved with all the kindness
All the warmth, all the gentleness he can
Those loving caresses
She will take deep within her
All of his love
All of his honor
All the wealth he has to give
He places it inside her deep, fertile chamber
There she will churn and churn
Yes, an enigma of fertile strength is she
A web of Hamingja she weaves
From which his love, his honor, his name
Continue on for eternity
Through honor and loyalty
He secures his love
In turn
In truth she is bound
Like the moon to the sun
Reflecting his light for all to see,
She returns his love with loyalty and faithfulness of her own
With caution
She must not hoard the wealth he gives
It is given so that she may transform it
To create new life
If she steals it away
Keeping it all for her own
Like a flower in a pot with no drain
She will drown her own roots
She will rot and decay.
The beauty of the bush is not simply the flower
It lies in the fruit it will bear
For from that fruit more life will come
Its seeds for continuation
Its flesh
Its juice
For nourishment
This is what completes the man
In turn, it completes the woman
The dance we are all destined perform
As every flower needs the rain
As every doe needs a buck
The hieros gamos eternally plays
The voice whispers to the lad
The majestic beams of mother moon
Are but a reflection of the father’s light and glory
The gifts he has bestowed upon her
she shines back upon us all
Just like a wife to her man
Take this gentle reminder
With feet on mother earth
With your gaze upon the moon in the night sky
Remember the faithful promise of the fatherly return
Of his radiance, durability, and order
Of your strength, courage, and bravery
Of her beauty, fruitfulness, and faithfulness
In those moments
Never forget
Just as the Earth completes the Father
The woman completes the man
