SWS: Light Breaks Water Challenge Winners

Welcome back to the Summer Writing Series, and to our first poetry challenge winners announcement of the season.

For this challenge, we asked you to write like sunlight touching the surface. To find the stillness before the ripple, the moment where something shifts without warning.

These are the ones that rose to the top.

🏆 Winners

Where the Light Touches by Tim Carmichael

Tim Carmichael's winning poem, Where the Light Touches, hits like a quiet truth you didn’t know you needed. The way morning moves through grief here feels gentle and unforced, like light showing up and doing what it does best, just being there.

refraction by Raistlin Allen

refraction by Raistlin Allen sits in that space between knowing and not quite knowing. There’s a calm tension to it, a feeling like something’s about to give, and you’re standing in the glow just before it does.

When the Light First Touched by Theo James Taylor

Theo James Taylor's When the Light First Touched feels like the moment right before a thought becomes a memory. It’s soft, reflective, and steady. Each line feels like a ripple that knows exactly where it’s going, even if you don’t, and that’s part of the magic.

So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish by Morgana

Morgana's So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish is strange in the best way, full of light, texture, and big feelings wearing wild colors. It’s a little surreal, a little dreamy, and totally itself.

A Light Touch by Aaron Richmond

Aaron Richmond's A Light Touch moves like something just waking up. It doesn’t rush, just opens line by line until you realize you’ve been holding your breath the whole time.

🎖️ Runners-up

• the mirror of God by John Cox
• the Nymphaea leaf by Gina C.
• portrait of an afternoon by Camille Ora-Nicole
• If Only the Sea Could Love a Star by Stacey Mataxis Whitlow (SMW)
• Surface Tension by Neli Ivanova
• She Showed Up in the Moonlight by Autumn S.
• 2am in the waiting room by Dane BH
• Lake Glaze by Ellie Hoovs
• Sun Catcher by Sam Eliza Green
• Turning. Stay. by River and Celia in Underland
• The Awakening of Oceans by Alison McBain
• Light that breaks you by Natasha Collazo
• I Will Not Let the Light Leave Me by Carolina Borges
• Still Here, Seeing by Luna Jordan
• A Natural Remedy by Jada Ferguson

🏅 Honorable Mentions

• rings in riot time by Mackenzie Davis
• shatter-water by Tyler C Clark (he/him)
• The Sound Between Wind and Music by Taylor Ward
• adrift by Sam Spinelli
• Absolution by D.K. Shepard
• When the Light Hits Just Right by Annie Edwards
• Where Sky Meets Water by PK Colleran
• Present Day by Hannah E. Aaron
• All the Colorful Wildflowers (and the humans who witness them) by Philip Canterbury
• The Night Cap by Bride of Sound

Check out the latest on Vocal Challenges.