IMS Eco Art & Writing Contest Winners
The ‘Mountain, Pond, Marsh and Star,’ IMS’ Eco Art and Writing contest spans the month of April to celebrate the IMS community’s interdisciplinary connection to the natural world for Earth Month.
Members of the IMS Community, including students, faculty, staff, and parents, were invited to submit poetry, prose, art, and music to this year’s contest. Submissions related to nature, ecology, climate, and globalism to highlight the humanity that connects us emotionally to our community and the earth.
A panel of local artists, writers, and creative professionals voted to elevate a winner in each of the contest’s categories. Congratulations to the following pieces that were selected as winners of this year’s contest.
LOWER CAMPUS ART WINNER
Ian Hodosy, 3rd Grade
5TH-6TH GRADE ART WINNERS
Sadie Swift & Charlotte Milner, 6th Grade
5TH-6TH GRADE WRITING WINNER
Glass Lake
Birdie Ledbetter, 6th Grade
At dawn, the lake forgets its name
and becomes a surface
polished thin as a held breath,
wide as a question no one answers.
The trees arrive first,
leaning into themselves,
their green thoughts doubled
in a language made of light.
Then the sky lowers its quiet face,
clouds drifting like unfinished sentences,
each one rewritten
in silver ink that will not last.
7TH-9TH GRADE ART WINNER
Niall McLain, 9th Grade
7TH-9TH GRADE WRITING WINNER
It Is Where We Happened
Camille Wilson, 9th Grade
They do not tell you this at first, that every laugh you have ever let slip into the air still lives somewhere in the wind, caught in branches, folded into sidewalks, pressed into the warm skin of afternoon light. The Earth remembers what we forget. It keeps our footprints in soft soil, our secrets in riverbeds, our growing pains in the cracks of pavement that stretch like old stories across cities and your home. This is where you learned your name, where you tripped and got back up. Every “I love you,” every goodbye, every moment you thought would be small, but somehow stayed permanent inside you, it all happened here. And the Earth held it gently, as if it knew you might need it later. But if we stop noticing it, stop caring for the place that carries us, the edges will blur. The colors will thin. The places that once held memory will forget how to hold anything at all. And what is a memory? Without a place to land? So we have to be careful with the ground we walk on, not because it belongs to us, but because we belong to it. Because the Earth is not just where we live. It is where we happened.
ADULT ART WINNER
Fox Maxwell
ADULT WRITING WINNER
Icarus
Alex Weyerhaeuser
She came to us on foot.
Toes bare, softening deep into
the clay core.
We welcomed her—
a sudden soft jolt
wave of air
pushing head back
chin up
eyes up
closed.
Bandana flew off and spiraled up with the seagulls.
When she opened her eyes again
she was up there too,
and those who had lifted her smiled
and waved from below
expecting
but she remembered she made her wings out of wax
and she was scared
the gulls would realize she was faking it
and that gravity would find her
and all those who had lifted her would shake their heads
for thinking she was any different.
On a map below
the termites gnawed and chattered,
recycling life through a fallen snag.
A giraffe was born breech
and someone dropped something small and pearly
that reminded them of their grandmother
that they would never find again.
As her eyes arced wide,
she thought of mome raths and the wild rumpus
and, holding her inhale so no one would see that she had failed,
she slowly floated back.
A seagull dropped something small and pearly
that reminded her of her grandmother.
She caught it in her hand
and when she landed,
those who had lifted her smiled
and waved.