I won the Rosamund Stuetzel Annual Poetry Award with Grandfather :D

This competition is open to all the secondary school students at my school and this year’s theme was ‘Hopes and dreams.’

It was a really close competition, and eventually I won by one vote.

Interestingly, it was the same line up as last year, with one of my closest friends and my ‘arch nemesis’ Lisle coming second and Marquie coming third. Unfortunately, it was also my last chance at this competition as I’m graduating later this year.

People cried. Which was awesome. Especially my mum. And my math teacher was teary eyed. Which was also awesome.

I couldn’t tell you all earlier because it was supposed to be a big secret until the results were announced yesterday.

Me.

Y13 Talent Show. I performed some of my own poetry (I read Fin and ‘More matter, with less art’).

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I think I was three years old when it happened.

I don’t remember it.

I only remember when it happened again,
but to your counterpart on my father’s side,
maybe six months later,
maybe a year,
and that too, vaguely.

A wide eyed child easily disturbed by change
Clutching at her mother and afraid 
of the insurmountable swamp
of white cloth, brown, wrinkled hands, red eyes and slack jaws
keening and wailing for three days straight.

They explained to me why we had made this unexpected trip home.
I don’t remember how, but I remember the garlanded portrait
of a man I should recognize and remember,
but now at seventeen I know only what I am told.
There is a faint guilt because I was afraid and not sad,
but I was only a wide eyed child, easily disturbed by change.

Was I even present for the first time, when it happened to you?
I do not know.
But you were there when the opposite happened,
when it happened to me back in 1994.
Of course, I only know this from photos. 

In a way, I don’t know you at all.
I met you, and you doted on me,
and we are bound through family,
but this is only what I have been told.

Mama used to cry when she spoke of you,
and Papa says you were a great man,
a real gentleman, loved and respected by all.
A garlanded photo sits at Mama’s mother’s house,
like the photo of your counterpart at Papa’s mother’s house.

There are other photos of you,
with your thick spectacles holding a bundle of blankets
that I am told is that wide eyed child,
but shriveled and pink at the time.

I am told that you were always anxious to leave
soon after finishing your meal.
I am told that you liked to sing.
I am told that you always wore green Ray-Bans with a gold rim.
I am told that my mother’s side of the family lay claim to me
because they see you in me,
but on the surface I have my paternal grandfather’s nose.

Mama showed me your letters once.
I wish I had the same neat handwriting.
They showed me your study once, and your record collection.
I took one of your books when I was 15 because you had written in it.
I wanted a physical connection to you.
I saw the ghost of your hand moving across the page.
I also bought green Ray-Bans with a gold rim. 

Mama told me you liked food.
I like food, very much.
Mama told me you like music,
I play the violin, but very badly.
Mama told me you looked down on Shakespeare,
I adore Shakespeare, so we may have a problem there.

But Mama told me you were a poet.
She said that day, to a wide eyed child, sixteen years of age,
just discovering the art of putting one word after another
in some vague rhythm that may touch someone’s heart,
‘if he was here, he would have been prouder of you than anyone else.’

And then I began to know you.
A connection grew, as I placed one word after another,
like you must have helped me place on foot after another.
Outside of time and mortality, somewhere cerebral and ethereal,
that wide eyed child meets her grandfather.

I meet you in the nothingness between stanzas
and in the fullness in the ink of my pen.
I meet you in the oscillations of air between articulation and understanding
and in the stillness of the appreciation of a word.
I meet you on the battlefield of defining the abstract
and in the gardens of blooming emotion.

I know you now, and not through what I am told,
but through myself.
You live on in that wide eyed girl,
and now, nearly eighteen,
she wants to make you proud. 

What if I were to turn on the lights as bright as they will go and step out of the shadows?
What if I were to allow the masks, the costumes, the veil to drop at your feet?
What if I were to slowly strip off my conscience, my inhibitions, and lay myself bare?
What if I were to peel off my skin, slip out of my exterior, expose myself to your scrutiny?
What if I were to open myself up, right here along my sternum, and show you what was inside? 

What would you do, when faced by the ugliness I hold within me?
What would you do, when my black, black blood oozes from my black, black heart?
What would you do, when my fears and faults rise from my chest to tower above you, larger than the space they were contained in?
What would you do, when you are forced to confront who I really am, stripped of all my pretense?

Would you in return, too cut yourself from sternum to navel and bare yourself to me?
Would you instead, disgusted by my truth, turn your back on me and allow the light to erase my darkness from your mind?
Would you remain to sift through my being in an attempt to find a beauty that isn’t there?

Will you still be able to look me in the eye?
Will you serve me better than the figure in the mirror did?

Are you ready for the big reveal?

These are the last words I’ll write for you,
More out of obligation that a need to confess.
A mere formality, only to signal the end.

This is not an outpouring of angst and love,
But rather a clinical declaration of the absence of love.
This is only to inform you that I am mended-
I have restored and repaired myself.

You see, I broke my mirror.
I was unable to look myself in the eye
And the shards of glass kissed my blood.
But the debris has been swept up now.

This journey has reached its destination,
The process has come to fruition.
I can now proceed unhindered
And seek my reflection elsewhere.

And so, perfunctorily I inscribe,

Fin.

Churn out a poem/short story/whatever at least once a week on this blog. Let’s hope I can keep it up!

All my words, and all my thoughts;
All that time I wasted, distraught;
Might never have existed and can be forgotten now
Because there’s no point, I’ve already fired the shot.

I was always in the wrong, stubborn and defiant,
Forcing you to be meek and compliant.
But then you found your voice and burst from your prison,
Shocking me into silence, as small as I was once giant.

My history is tinged with bitter irony,
If it wasn’t my own story, I might even find it funny.
I believed that everything stopped when I closed my eyes,
And now my sight is so clear that it even hurts to see.

So I propose a toast: here’s to goddamn stupidity,
I tried living in the past until the future consumed me.
Saying sorry too many times can desensitize the one who is wronged,
So don’t make any mistakes, that’s the moral of my story.

It’s not a mistake if you knew what you were doing,
It’s certainly not one if it wasn’t your boyfriend you were screwing.
A very merry Christmas, and a happy, happy new year,
I resolve not to love, for it is always my undoing. 

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