2008 Winner

ROOKIE WRITER 2008
Overall Winner
Grade 12 category winner

Ryan Faliszewski
Semiahmoo Secondary School
Teacher: Mrs. Meehan

The Pumpkin King

With his cloak of
Soft rain swirling
mysteriously about him
the Pumpkin King
slips past
Summer’s lazy gaze.
Relaxed, he perches
atop his wheat bushel throne
and with a
sly Jack-o-lantern smile,
he coaxes
the cool music of fall
from the strings of his damp lute.

In the upper shelves
of the trees, his subjects
stir. Their leafy gossip
is aroused.
For too long they have sat like
paper, blank and impressionable,
but now they are ready to change.
They answer their
Autumnal Lord’s
cunning call, and
don their fiery gowns – for
the Pumpkin King
revels in gaiety,
and wishes his subjects to do the same.

And so, with a revelation
like a rainbow floating through a window,
the leaves descend
from their deciduous dens.
The sly satyr of Samhain
feeds them:
sweet maple wine and
vehement poetry readings,
singing and dancing
as the sky explodes above;

But of all the
Lords and Ladies of the Seasons,
the Pumpkin King is the most cunning,
and he knows when
his colourful celebration
must end.
Thus,
red-faced and warm with laughter,
his friends fall to
the ground, deep
with soft, merry slumber

And as the cold, cobbled boots
of the old Duke of Winter
scrape over them,
a while silence falls over the land

And the High Halloween Harlequin
dons his apple-harvest crown
and dances, warm, in his hideout
before sharing a corn-cob pipe with a garden gnome
and whispering lovesongs
into the green ear of a nymph.