Baldwin High School student named a poetry contest winner

Baldwin High School student Dylan Pigott, of Ms. Hughes’ AP Language and Composition class, recently won the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association 34th Annual Student Poetry Contest 2020 for his category: 11th grade individual poetry anthology.

The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association celebrates the creative efforts put forth by students and their teachers. In light of the 2020 leap year, the theme, based on Whitman’s poem, “Joy, Shipmate, Joy” and the line, “The ship is clear at last, she leaps!,” called for students to submit a poem about “leaping” into a “leap day.”

This year the awards were presented via video due to the present need for social distancing, school officials said.

The virtual award ceremony video was shared privately with the families of the winners, along with their teachers, on Walt Whitman’s 201st birthday, May 31, 2020.

Pigott’s poem reads:

“The Roving Protector”

The griot.

She leaps.

Bounding over the conflagrations of past and present.

Clutching to the former,

the ci-devant,

the antecedent.

She leaps,

But never high enough to forget.

Never far enough to ignore their calls.

The calls of the ancestors.

Be it high, low, or far,

She carries them with her,

But is never weighed down.

She is never cumbersome.

She is the griot.

The vessel of our torments.

She is the griot.

The Cerberus of our stories.

She is the griot.