Excellent submissions made selecting winners difficult
We are always impressed by the creativity and quality of submissions for the Bora Laskin Law Library’s annual Poetry Contest and this year’s submissions were no exception. All of the poems, which ranged from haikus to limericks and everything in between, were excellent. We had such difficulty selecting the top three poems that only five points separated first from third place.
The first prize winner is Evan Linn (3L) for Reasoning by analogy. Second prize goes to Haya Sardar (2L) for Mooting and the third prize winner is Kyle MacDonald (1L) for Three Fabrications.
Congratulations to Evan, Haya, and Kyle, and a hearty thank you to all those that entered a poem in the contest. We appreciate your time, effort, and creativity.
Until next year.
Reasoning by analogy
A statute is an act:
a thing and a doing.
The legislator is always
speaking.
.
An act is a stone, heavy and cold,
but vulnerable.
Solid,
if seen for a moment;
over an eon, it is water.
Fragments slough
off, yield softness and soil.
Are reformed, interpreted, encoded.
Uttering inaudibly, spoken
by system:
dirt has authority.
.
A law is an order:
a command and a structure.
The sovereign is always
grounded.
By Evan Linn (3L)
Mooting
Good Morning Justices
It’s time for me to put on a show, an act
I’ve been told I must have tact when it comes to handling
The judges, my colleagues, my friends, the client
Stay calm, cold
Never show emotion
Speak slower, faster, use different words
Stroke their ego
Learn to serve, take it on your chin
Let’s begin with the storytelling…
Wear your little robe & little armour
Sit on your arms to prevent gestures
Don’t make face, don’t have tics
Stay calm, old
Make it seem like you’ve done this before
Know every question
And I mean every question
But Lord help you if you seem planned
Don’t make a joke
But take jokes;
Take sips;
Take pause;
Take take take
But don’t break character
Judges don’t want the show to end
Be so flexible that you bend over backwards to accommodate
Go backwards—
Forwards—
Inside out—
Show you can break the bright lines
But stay calm, fold
Fold into character
Give parts of yourself till they’ve gone in dust
Don’t be afraid to combust!
Don’t take too long
Concede where it hurts
The story must resist twists and turns
Learn what hill you’re willing to die on
.
Then die for them.
By Haya Sardar (2L)
Three Fabrications
We take to the law to write our story
Because how else could we love ourselves
Absent this corrupted world, and all its’ glory
Compelling a younger self
That was our story
.
Spending long days beneath fluorescent light
We turn pages to learn their plight.
Hopeful their sacrifice was not in vain,
We find a way to ignore their pain
To our craft, it matters not how they felt,
So long as they’ve earned their place upon our shelf.
But now it is our story
.
At last, we don a cloak to hide our shame
Scour for ways to assign some blame
In front of one, to whose will we bend
We sling words and play pretend
Knowing our rival was never a friend
That will be our story
By Kyle MacDonald (1L)
