Photo Caption Contest Winner/And a Poetry Contest!

Your entries in the contest were good, and it was hard to pick a clear winner. (Oh, and if you visited early this morning -- sorry for the premature automatic post of my "found poem," composed of parts and pieces of all the entries, minus the winner information. I crashed last night before polishing the post! Argh!) Thanks to all who entered!

The winner of the writer's prize packet goes to...

Anita at Rollercoaster Days! Anita put the evocative and fitting word "drowned" in the sentence with "dock," as a description: As she ambled towards the dock, she was drowned in memories of dusky summer promises and firefly kissed skin.

A prize was also garnered by Wendy at All in a Day's Thought for her lovely entry: Beyond blankets of dirt and canopied leaves, far below the spreading sunlight it waits; my place for reflection and emergence.

Surprise! Here's a secondary contest inspired by the first~~

Make your own poem using only words from the photo caption contest entries found HERE. You can change the word tense, line breaks and spacing, of course, but you may NOT add any extra words of your own.

Email your poems of no more than 15 lines to AngieDLed@aol.com by tomorrow at midnight, and I'll announce a winner on Wednesday! Put FOUND POEM CONTEST ENTRY in the subject line.

Doh, I forgot to state what the winning poet receives ----- a Barnes & Noble gift card! So, keep those entries coming.

Finally, here's my "found poem" crafted from the caption contest entries:

Sweet Home Louisiana

Beyond blankets of leaves below
spreading sunlight waits
for emergence around that corner,
filtered through trees saying
welcome home. Wake up, [ space ] hurry.
Tires scrape and burn slow
as Spanish moss, [ space ] fall coming.
There boys fish,
amble to the dock [ space ] drown
in memories of summer
promises, Hansel & Gretel's
house, a Yellow Brick Road.
Little old men in stable arms
of oaks mesmerized by the stillness.

Spotlight On...Monkey Photo Contest Picks

The contest on Thursday was fun, and I enjoyed all the comments/entries. It was really hard to narrow the choices down to just three, but alas, it had to be done. [BTW, a very odd thing happened on the Gumbo Writer's blog "create post" page -- the little icon that lets you switch font colors has disappeared! How strange is that? So if this post does not appear in the normal dark black I am so fond of, please know it's because I had no other choice when I was putting together this post last night. Hey, I wonder if the monkey ate it? Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle...it just popped back up there, so now I can write in black! Computers and technical stuff can be so maddening!]

Anyhoo, here's the picture for which all you witty and talented people made captions:

Isn't he/she adorable? I can't figure out if it's the humanoid facial expression or the clothes that makes me want to bring this little baby home and make it part of my family! But I digress...again.

The top contenders for the top secret double naught fantabulous prize to be snail mailed are:

1. Terri - "Not the hairbrush again!!"


2. Melissa - "My gas bill is HOW much?"


3. Barbara - "What? A root canal?!?!?"

My caption thought was, "WHUT? Blogger's gonna be down for maintenance for HOW long???!"

Please take a sec to fill out the poll. And remember, only one vote per customer. :) Good luck, contestants!

All Aboard!

I like this nice ordinary picture, although I probably would have cropped it a bit closer in if I'd taken it. A simple but colorful city bus pulling away from a homey-looking clean commercial area, taking passengers to and from work. It's a Louisiana scene, so this counts as a Monday Tout Le Monde (all over the world) topic.

If you could enlarge the photograph, you'd see the bus is bound for an unusual destination. The front marquis reads, "Cemetery." Does that change your perception of the picture any? Does it make your mind spin with endless possibilities and questions?

To get your creativity or Monday morning foggy head going, can you think of a plot (no pun intended, although it does fit the subject well) involving the bus and one or more occupants?

I'm going to run a little contest. The best paragraph with a storyline fitting the picture will win a prize on Friday to post at your blog...if I can figure out how to get it to you! If not, I'll either come clean your house or send you a pound of some really good coffee. So, c'mon...post those plots!