First Prize in our 2025 Open Poetry Competition was won by Oblivious, by Sharon Black.
Sharon is from Glasgow and lives in a remote valley of the Cévennes mountains in France. Her poetry is published widely and has won prizes including The London Magazine Poetry Prizes 2019 and 2018. She has published four full collections of poetry and a pamphlet. Her latest collections are The Last Woman Born on the Island (Vagabond Voices, 2022), set in Scotland and exploring the landscapes and heritage of her home country, and The Red House (Drunk Muse, 2022), set in her adopted homeland of the Cévennes. Since 2016 she has been editor of Pindrop Press. www.sharonblack.co.uk
____
Oblivious
Sitting in a corner of your past
on plastic chairs
or cross-legged on the floor, heads low
in concentration, fingers following a line
across a page or leafing to the next:
those who almost made it
but the ending never worked, who
died in their cots, or of a rare disorder,
a school bus pulling out too soon,
the one you spent your whole life
trying to write, who slopped like fish
into a toilet bowl. Those their mothers
never knew of, each perfect word and line break,
each heartbreaking conclusion
a red star, days, minutes, seconds old,
just a trace left in the cells, a watermark.
Leave them be. It’s quiet time.
We’ll come back in the morning,
replace the books on shelves, gather up
a toy or cardigan,
pull the covers up a little
as they sleep, faces closed,
turned inwards, soft and porous,
as out of reach
as the final lines you cut away
to leave the reader a sense of mystery.
____
Kit Fan judged the competition this year. Here is his comment on the poem:
The poem plays out glimpses of mortal threats with unyielding precision and reticence. There is wit in referring back and forth to the act of writing without off-tracking into claustrophobia. The unexpected gear-change of ‘Leave them be. It’s quiet time. / We’ll come back in the morning’ invites a sense of uncertainty and intimacy, enlarging the poem’s circumference. The absence of the first person is a breath of fresh air.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 