- Tabitha Bushell, Yr 12, Auckland Girls' Grammar School: ‘Ink Man''
- Nic Harty, Yr 12, Karamu High School: 'Stranger'
- Hunter Douglas, Yr 12, Wellington College: 'Peter Pan'
- Ish Doney, Yr 12, St Andrews College, Christchurch: 'Make It More Like a Song'
- Alissa Hacket, Yr 13, Wanganui High School: 'Lullaby for an Insomniac Nation'
- Grace Thomas, Yr 12, Wellington High School: 'Brief Reality'
- Arron McLaughlin, Yr 13, Hamilton Boys' High School: 'bridge, river, hands, and'
Sophia Graham – (Year 13, Epsom Girls Grammar School, Auckland)
Like Tea and Crumpets
I was almost Victoria Jane. Like tea and crumpets.
Like train stations. Like long gloves.
And then I wasn't. I was ‘baby Graham’
and at night, my mother,
smuggling me out of the hospital nursery,
would whisper names in my ear,
trying them on me like hats,
testing to see which ones tripped off her tongue,
and which got lodged at the back of her throat.
Daddy wanted to call me Grace. Like his grandmother.
Like lace handkerchiefs. Like hymns.
But my mother said Grace was a name for old ladies,
so the tag on my wrist was unchanged, my birth unregistered,
and my uncles, playing with my toes and counting my fingers,
laughed and called me Gertrude, Horatia, Augusta.
My aunt said that my name should be Lila. Like scented pillows.
Like dusty books. Like soft jazz.
Still my mother read books
and tried to find a name I could live up to,
while my daddy tucked me into my cot,
with satin trimmed blankets.
And then I was Sophia Claire. Like Greek philosophers.
Like Italian screen sirens. Like pink roses.
I was Sophia Claire. Like wisdom.
Like clarity. Like me.
Alisha Vara – (Year 12, Rangi Ruru Girls' School, Christchurch)
strawberries strung on lines
I
the house is vast
and blank.
every good boy deserves fruit, you
whisper, your face imprisoned
in me where
a gazelle creeps through green,
through blood,
raw and persisting
as we say grace.
II
the world never seemed
so bizarre before.
I cut my fingernails short and
paint them red,
like red strawberries strung on lines,
stolen lines with a certain kind of grace.
I want to know who will read this, read my
mind and see me lost within the bed like I
see it now and
make it clear I could never quit
your morning coffee or sad smiles.
I will not show this to anyone.
III
we have just begun.
you say sanguine and repeat it.
I am cycling down a hill with the rain,
soft and endless.
what would you do with the sky
unravel and weave it through your ceiling,
string it down your harp?
your hands rough and
dry on my skin.
History
(Inspired by Tomaž Šalamun’s poem, ‘History’)
Ioana is a queen
knocked off the checkers by a pawn.
She sleeps by day and walks by night, the nightcrawler,
blue and mysterious.
She is Mystique, shapeshifting, people don’t recognise her.
Ioana rides Northland’s asphalt waves, splashing tar, carving far.
Sandy to Woolley’s, the sharks bite at every corner,
it’s a Slice of Life.
She swims with mermaids in the pools and with whales at the bay.
Kaleidoscope beauty.
Extended family holidays are a Slice of Heaven,
singing Dave Dobbyn up the laundry chute.
Playing spies. I spy.
Reading hour is cuzzie hour, is weaving flax flowers,
extended family photos, immediate family photos, in height order, in age order.
She’s a Kiwi, a flightless bird, on a school trip to Buenos Aires.
Piso or peso? a friend asks her.
Tango dancers, jewellery merchants and merchandise sellers line la calle.
Fileteado dance the walls,
football heroes cover the halls.
She rips weeds from between the cobblestones,
waits for them to grow again,
shoots for 3s, looks up to Steven Adams
spectating Friday night bball.
Her Kobes are anklebreakers.
Ioana smells pungent spices from the curry stall.
She’s hit with acetone fumes from the nail bar
in Takapuna Mall.
Teen dwellers, let off the leash for a day, hunt in packs.
Mini shorts and puffer jackets for survival.
She overhears debates.
They protest, but what for?
News at six, delayed at seven but she isn’t home until eleven.
She will set her alarm for six thirty.
Ioana will eat nutella for breakfast, and this is her history.
Ioana Yule Manoa
Year 12
Northcote College
The Golden Rule
We followed a golden rule.
We promised to always work it out.
Love however cannot be calculated like simple arithmetic,
And my solutions led you to become my X.
There was once a time when my heart would beat for you in sinusoidal waves
Leading me to believe that our love would be infinite. Lying tangent to your curves
Our bodies would twist to create that perfect lemniscate.
It was your permutation of my admirable traits that ruined our equation.
You placed more importance on the plane of my stomach than my genius,
The proportion of my curves than my kindness
And the kgs of my weight than anything within.
Really? The one with the megaparsec waist shouldn’t judge.
Looking back now I realise why you were such an outlier.
It must have been the gravitational pull of your mass
Deceiving me, forcing me to think that you were more attractive.
It wasn’t just your magnitude though
I would have been so integer if you hadn’t been so negative!
To be completely honest you were such an asymptote you mother function!
So once I’d said goodbye,
All my problems were solved!
Anastazia Docherty
Year 13
Cambridge High School
Death and the Maiden
The sour taste of a sweet tongue.
Food, strangely delicate finger-sized bites.
A taste of deep chocolate and tempered liquor.
A fine wine, red, with just a hint of violence.
Such an empty court of red, bursting into life.
Unpredictable, exciting, unforgivable.
The echo of a woman waltzing.
A shadow haunting in my mind’s memories.
A dancing maiden tapping her shoes round the banquet hall.
Light raindrops caressing her damaged shoes.
The smooth feel of rhythm as it pulsates her body.
The grind of fingers down a window, trying to enter.
I was a bird in dress taking the clouds as its own,
Flying high, the soft cold moisture of breath skimming off its wings.
As it made steady progress across the sky,
There came a sweet reminder of what it had left behind.
Now as it dives the air suffocates and constricts,
Dark and heavy, with ominous trouble.
Forced through caves and tight crevices
Scraped by canine-like stalactites,
It’s a hunter exploring the darkness like a new open-world,
Opening a sandbox of adventurous Trauma.
Cold, icy lake hands seek their desired prey.
And I’m away behind the curtain of wounding comfort.
The sun bursts again with light and the sky beckons its smooth blue touch.
Yellow fields call out in a sweet, reassuring voice.
My dull wings are clipped and a cage dams my overpowering senses.
A healing harm of dull shock and restricted euphoria.
All the time is spent counting,
Totalling the hunts, the chases, the captures.
The bars squeeze confidence and will.
Time like me loses its flight.
Desperately clung thoughts fuel a race to the finish line.
Rushed through the bars I am greeted with an explosion of senses.
Flavours of freedom glide up my nerves and excite my brain
Knowing the pleasure it rewards.
I was a bird in dress unable to take flight.
The diminished size of the world within me.
The smooth feel of that rhythm pulsating my un-forgetting body.
Now it catalyses remembrance creating a thirst to claim.
A goal to achieve a deserving piece of mind.
My life spurred forward, my conscience questioned.
Can you hunt the hunter, without becoming predator?
Josh Richards
Year 13
Collingwood Area School
Tahanan
They told me to expect
The desperate heat that clung
And forced sweat to wear rivers
Into our skin
Greys and blacks and rust and concrete
Seeping into the streets
And the people
They told me to expect
Marketplaces awash with
“Yes Ma’am”s
“Hey Joe”s
Coca-Cola in plastic bags
Power lines like messy spaghetti
And rooftops spreading out
Like a tin forest
They told me to expect
Rice fields climbing
Up into the mountains
Hidden under shawls of cloud
Paper parasols and skinny cats
Children who have fought the world
And lost
They told me to expect
Desolation and the weight
Of a nation of people I had never met
Whose very being reflects my apathy
The heartbreak of a girl who has everything
And nothing
They hadn’t told me to expect
The paper buildings curling up at the corners
As the sun touched their walls and set them alight
The child in my arms
Whose smile
Sent out fragments of colour
To eclipse my monochrome heart
No one warned me I was coming home.
Holly Morton
Year 13
Otumoetai College
Movement of Life
I
She is dignified.
Her studies, of the highest value.
Artistic and light.
Her name, Étude
musical, bright.
Her movements light with dignified grace,
peaks of interest, though
she knows no haste.
Étude, she is
precise.
II
The child of joy, her playful grin.
Bounce and beauty,
the epitome of spring.
Her name, Printemps.
Her body light
beautiful, playful
soars
to great
heights.
Printemps, she is
agile.
III
Her name, Libre
coiled in midnight.
Changes dark to light.
Flashes bright, she can take flight
swift, quick.
Only to go back to the deep midnight.
The light motion, gone but never slack
for her colour, though dark is never black.
Libre, she is
free.
IV
High in class, elegant in action.
Her movements fast, though never hasty.
Long material touches her feet,
two fine shoes, their heels meet.
Her name, Mazurka
Attention. Engage.
She has might, though ever graceful.
Mazurka, she shows
pride.
V
On the dance floor
I am anyone but me.
I am Étude, artistic and light.
I am Printemps, beautiful in flight.
I am Libre, coiled in midnight.
I am Mazurka, lively with might.
Four dances to connect
four chances to project
my love of dance,
perfect.
.
Katie Hooper
Year 12
Timaru Girls’ High School
Drifting
For weeks I noticed
his eyes flickering,
sometimes watching us
and sometimes gazing
through our faces.
His thoughts drifted
from our apartment to
the little village with
red concrete houses that
spread like moss over the
trough of the mountains.
He remembered the clink of his mother’s
silver anklets as she walked
in bare feet along the dirt roads.
Many years had faded from his memory,
lost in a drifting mind,
but he knew that in a year’s time
the kitchen tap would still be dripping,
the radio still buzzing
and we would still leave at nine
and be back before dinner.
Perhaps he also knew that
his grandson didn’t actually get a job
and the rent went up and
that everyone had
already made plans for after
his passing and nobody told him.
.
Sarah Liu
Year 13
Epsom Girls’ Grammar School
Soft Cotton Mornings
you are most beautiful in the morning
when fresh light washes in like wet paint and everything is okay
in those slow stretching seconds when the sun spreads over the world
everything is awake and singing except us in white sheets
and your skin peeks through soft cotton like a china collection shining
like marble carved by the gods it is smooth
and rich with shape, gliding over
the blades of your shoulders (the apricot sunrise at nine thirty)
you are the best of the morning
ripe perfection augmented by the gold of sun
with your eyes closed resting it is easier to see the universe behind them
the ultimate splendor of life is so clear
in those slow stretching seconds when you are not awake but I,
with the sun and birds, and stars hidden in berry blue skies
find something in your skin
your sleeping peace
and it is pure
and you are so beautiful
Leah Dodd
Year 13
New Plymouth Girls’ High School