Showcasing the winners of the Creative Manchester Poetry Competition 2020
Read the poems selected as winners of the Creative Manchester Poetry Competition 2020, presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing.
Launched on World Poetry Day 2020, this Twitter-based competition invited budding writers to express their thoughts about the climate within a 280-character poem. 200+ entries were judged by three esteemed poets: University Chancellor Lemn Sissay, the Centre for New Writing's Professor of Poetry, John McAuliffe and Ledbury Critic, Maryam Hessavi, who assessed the micropoems based on their deployment of language, form, sound and imagery.
Below, read the three winning poems, as well as seven additional poems which were highly commended by the judges.
The winners
I remember how every year
the rivers mutinied.
Terrace-street houses,
wringing out the water,
inch by sodden inch.
Abandoned carpets, and
Scared-eyed dogs,
floating on swan-shaped lilos.
The women gather
with their water-ruined hands.
They blame the council.
Does this Spring count, this season without her human audience? /
Bu bahar sayilacak mi? Insansiz bir mevsimde çiçekler kim için açar?
Her audience was never us.
Her audience are the bees.
As we look on churches
so they look on trees.
Au revoir Dear World
Lingered dead in dark dreck sea
Naked, quivered --- abstaining tree
Somber obsolescence is
Thy levied constellation
Contagion bluntly abrupt
Lord's exquisite creation
Deforested, deoxygenated
Beacon of light extinguished
Pardon for the harm.
Highly commended
“Stay at home!” we yell
from our spacious, leafy gardens
to those going mad
in airless high-rise flats,
dreaming of the park,
wilting like late-spring daffodils.
“We're in this together” we cry
as we paint rainbows,
hoard food
and snitch on our neighbours.
Climate Change
Spring
Summer
Summer
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Janober
Febember
Margust
Apuary
Maypril
Janinter
Decing
Sumuary
Octautumn
Cairns are emerging from the ice, one by one:
the pass is yielding to us
clothing, reindeer pelts, leather shoes
and feathered arrows
a thousand or so years old. Higher passes still
grip their ice, their histories
(unlike the climate's trend) yet to be disclosed.
Watch the boy throw
cups of rainwater
onto the peatland blaze,
as if the weak toss &
few drops would douse;
summon the final wisp
Smoke rising like sweat
from wet hot backs;
turf smouldering,
black land clouds
snaking high,
his arms outstretched like pines
There were fires in Australia
but that was a long time ago.
There are fires in Siberia
but they're miles away.
I go to bed.
There are no fires
in my dreams.
Miroslav Holub said go
and open the door
at least there will be
a draught.
I open the door.
I see fires.
I'm building ditches, ponds
puddled with clay
I'll grow skeins of watercress
& webbed feet
my skin may turn subtly
responsive, secrete
moisture like a rounded hymen
my vocal sac
could pulse at mud
the boggy wrack of wetlands
Beached and bleached and burned and done.
One day there'll be nothing new under the sun.