Award Winning Poetry

When I was in the 9th grade, my classmates and I were forced to write something for submission to Artbreak. This "festival," held downtown, was (and remains) an art exhibit/competition for Caddo Parish students. My school was a tiny private school searching for an academic identity within the area. Its only claim to fame at that point (it's really no different now) was its absurdly successful football team. So, Mrs. Ellis, one of the school's three counselors and my English teacher, ordered us to write poems for entry at Artbreak. She hoped we might somehow give the school a good showing in the competition. The poems had to be finished and turned in by the end of the class period because Mrs. Ellis had to mail them off that afternoon.
My friends and I opted for the shortest form of poetry we knew of: the Haiku. None of us had any intention of producing anything good. None of us cared. We set to putting song lyrics into Haiku form. I ended up presenting (among others almost exactly like it) the following poem:

Amazing Grace! How
sweet the sound that saved a wretch
like me! I once was

Mrs. Ellis rejected my poem, and those of my friends that were much like my own. She told me I couldn't go to lunch until I produced something good. I returned to my desk and wrote the following:

Rake, rake, rake, rake, rake.
Autumn's not spelled like it sounds.
Why do leaves fall down?

It was accepted and entered into competition. Weeks later I was presented a very poorly framed copy of my poem. It had won--a tribute to my lifelong disgust of yardwork, the way my mind wanders while I'm doing it and the clearly poor state of poetry in Caddo Parish.