Our Mother Poetry Contest Winner is ...

Mother's Day does not fall on the same day for every country around the world. Woman-Stirred group members are from the US and UK, and so we are thrilled today to announce the winner of the Woman-Stirred Mother Poetry Contest as Mothering Sunday is being celebrated in the UK.

Over the next few weeks we will be featuring poems from our three finalists, leading up to Mother's Day celebrations in the US and other parts of the world on May 14, 2006.

The winner of the 2006 Mother Poetry Contest is ...


Zara Raab, for her poem, My Daughter Drives


A special mention goes to our other finalists:

Charles Fishman for War Story: 1942 and What It Was to Be Stone
Claire J. Baker for A Protest Against the Passing of the Great Ship

Thank you to everyone who supported Woman-Stirred by submitting to the contest. Our congratulations go to Zara Raab for a moving poem we hope you all enjoy.

My Daughter Drives

She strides to the cherry red wagon
parked curbside by the leafy beech,
then folds her slim form and slips in,
a love note, entering the reverie of
change, tuning inward, gazing out
beyond the locked steering, into
the oncoming rush of her dreams.
All summer, stretched on the sofa,
she's cried, "If only I could drive!"
On a dime, she'd close herself -
packing it all into eyes and hands
and leans forward into the wheel,
learning to leave me, learning to leave,
learning to live on her skin, letting
the wind ruffle her hair, making the
red car her tutor, her lover, hers -
until a flesh-and-blood one arrives.
From my kitchen, I witness the news:
My child, my child, is learning to drive.

© Zara Raab

Zara Raab tells us ...

I was born in Willits, California, 165 miles north of San Francisco, to parents whose great-grandparents had settled in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties in the 1800s. At boarding school in the rainy outskirts of Portland, I memorized Keats, Yeats and Shakespeare and wrote my own poems. Later at Mills College, the Black Mountain College poets like Charles Olson or Louis Zukofsky were my influences.

I moved to Paris for a year, obtained a graduate degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and lived by my pen in Washington, D.C. until the Reagan era of fur coats and limousines. I headed west again to San Francisco, worked as a copywriter, married and raised a family. My poems appear occasionally in small literary magazines and I am a member of the Northern California Book Reviews.

Mother Poetry Contest submission guidelines and prize details
Read more about the international history of Mother's Days
Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation 1870