Windows Publications in association with Cavan Crystal
23rd National Student Poetry Competition 2015
Adjudicated by Heather Brett & Noel Monahan
€100 1st Prize in each category
With several runner-up prizes and over 50 highly commended certificates
Closing date Friday 20th March 2015
Entry to this competition is free. Entrant details (name, age, school or contact number) must be clearly marked on the BACK of each entry if posting work or at the end of the work if sending by email. Poems should NOT have been published before or won a prize in any other competition, and must be the student’s OWN work.
Entries will also be accepted on line as well as by post and from individual students as well as entries sent by schools. Class poems and poems written by groups of students are acceptable but there will be only one prize given per winning poem. For email entries please send to: heatherbrett22@hotmail.com or by post to Windows/Cavan Crystal Poetry Competition, Cavan Crystal Hotel, Dublin Rd. Cavan, Co. Cavan, Ireland on or before FRIDAY 20th MARCH 2015, clearly stating which category you are entering. The award ceremony will be held in Cavan Crystal Hotel on Sunday 10th May at 4pm. It is a condition of the awards that top prize winners must be present at the ceremony before a prize can be awarded.
Junior Category-
Open to all students throughout Ireland and the U.K. in primary or national school education or equivalent. (8-12/13 years)
Senior Category- Open to all students throughout Ireland and the U.K. in second level education or equivalent. (12-18 years)
Irish Language Category – Open to all students between 10–18 years old.
Enquiries: 0870534737 www.windowspublicationsanddesign.com
Here’s a poem I entered when I was 17. Didn’t win, but it was nice to get into the book!
The Calabash Tree
How do you pardon the petulant?
With fervour they try to
Make something of nothing
Calabash, Calabash –
They’ve heard of you.
Pomiferous you stand,
Glorious with superficial fruition
But you can’t feed them –
Not directly;
Their hungers are not satiated by your hollow vessels –
Empty plates do not endear visitors.
Calabash, Calabash –
I see you everywhere.
You embellish,
You paint happy little nothings.
You master misty, murky mortice locks
For doors that will not be uncovered or opened.
Calabash, Calabash –
Burn a candle for me.
Make lanterns of your global gourds and elongate the gloaming.
Let the effulgence enrapture me and
Outshine the nebula of deeper elusive hungers
When you hear the clamour I sound for want of a Spirit,
As I am awakened from my ashen reverie.
Calabash, Calabash –
How I’ve burnt life away –
Elucidating for fear of anything fuscous.
Yet fumigation has given me just that –
How it laughs at me now.
Calabash, Calabash –
Smile an innocent smile for me,
When I look upon thee,
Sister, oh image of me:
Everything I dread yet
Wish to be.
Calabash, Calabash –
An illustrious tree,
An innocuous tree, which I harass
You are among mountains of mud and rock –
Things that do not change –
They’ll make bowls of you
And inundate you with the physical things they prey upon,
Because they think the Spirit decrepit.
Calabash, Calabash –
Who is it that I am again,
A hater of hate?
Be a helmet on my mind –
A natural protector from
Unkind
For I cannot endeavour to protect it any longer –
Not when they tempt me this way.
Maybe one day I shall hang from a branch –
Victim to this –
And make lucid the reign of ornamentation.
You’ve been planted
In the Peruvian Sunlight
By something, by
Someone
An entity unknown to me.
It blinds me – the Sun –
In other ways of course.
But I see you there,
I see you fair.
Nature feeds and
Nourishes you.
It’s in nature.
It’s in design.
My dear –
Calabash, Calabash
Smile a smile,
Laugh a laugh.
Can’t you do it for me?
My dear, my dearest,
Calabash tree.
