Poetry Competition Commended | ‘Untold’ By Lindsay Reid
For Poetry Day Ireland 2018, HeadStuff.org launched a brand new poetry competition to celebrate this fantastic day of poetic activity around the country. This year the theme of the day was ‘Surprises’. For our competition we chose the theme ‘Surprise Encounters’
Our esteemed panel of judges for this year’s poetry competition were Colm Keegan and Erin Fornoff. Erin noted that they were ‘looking for surprising poems, and poems that arrest and compel and leave an emotional legacy. National Poetry Day is a great way to show that poetry is a fibre in everyone’s life, and speaks to truth that everyone shares.’
We at HeadStuff were humbled by the response to the competition with the sheer numbers of those who submitted their work. The judges were deeply impressed by the high quality of submissions. it was an incredibly difficult decision to pick three winners and thirteen commended poems.
Over the next few days we will publish the three placed poems and thirteen commended ones. We would like to congratulate all the poets on their achievement.
We would also like to thank everyone who took the time to submit to the competition. We received a high number of submissions of really high quality so please do keep watching the HeadStuff poetry section for more details on future submission information. Finally we would like to thank University College Cork, Poetry Ireland and Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat for their support.
Read All Winning and Commended Poems Here
Untold
By Lindsay Reid
The night she ran away, she found how cold
The woods could be. She shivered in the grey
And rustling undergrowth; all night she lay
Curled in a tiny ball. When they cajoled
Her later to say more, she softly told
Them all she could remember of her stay
Was fighting hard to keep the cold at bay,
The biting chill that hungered to take hold.
Some things she didn’t tell them. How the thorn
And bracken had embraced her. How the trees
Had whispered to her when her mind was still.
But most, the golden clouds in early dawn
That came with bird song carried on the breeze
And rose like bright smoke over the dark hill.
The first HeadStuff poetry competition was kindly judged anonymously by Colm Keegan and Erin Fornoff.
HeadStuff are extremely grateful to University College Cork, Poetry Ireland, and Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat for their generous support of the competition.
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
