ESU Formal Verse Contest 2024 - Winners
The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch) is pleased to announce the winners for the inaugural ESU Formal Verse Contest, for a metrical, rhymed or unrhymed poem of 70 lines or less.
We received a large number of entries from poets in Australia, the USA, Canada and Germany and thank everyone for participating. The final winners were selected by Prime Minister’s Award-winning poet Stephen Edgar. The President’s Choice Award was chosen by ESU Victoria Branch President Robert Furlan. The winners were announced at an Awards Ceremony in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 14 December 2024.
Click here to watch a video of the 30-minute presentation ceremony on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOzVD09XHiY
Congratulations to our winners!
Winning Poems:
First Prize ($5,000) “Continuing City” - Jesse Keith Butler (Canada).
Click here to watch a video of Jesse reading his winning poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GChqQw6jAds
Runner-up ($1,000) “Learning Greek” - Kevin Hart (Australia)
Runner-up ($1,000) “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work” - Marly Youmans (USA)
President's Choice Award ($1,000) “Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work” - Marly Youmans (USA)
Continuing City - by Jesse Keith Butler
Winner
For us there’s no continuing city. Road
construction strips our streets raw summer-long
but last year’s potholes still seep through. Unload
your daydreams here and shuffle on this bus
to stiffly jar down Ogilvie. You’re wrong
to hope these unkempt gridlines hum with pity.
Expect the bus to skip your stop. For us
that’s all there is. We’ve no continuing city.
A high-rise will burst bristling from the park
you played in as a child. You’ll curse each truss
that night spans out to frame a ribcage—dark
on urban half-light. Sit back. Don’t ask whether
developers run city hall. For us,
there are no answers. Watch them all shush by—
those half-constructed towers, strung together
like scarecrows, skeletal against the sky.
The bus jolts you alert. Some detour’s sent
you lurching out along the highway. Rest
is nowhere here. The rich live high, while tent
encampments fill the underpasses. Stare
out past your blurred reflection. All our best
intentions meet a slow death by committee.
But gathered through the night, just past the glare,
wait remnants of the discontinued city.
You’ve reached a new development. The bus
drops you and shudders off into the dusk.
There’s no continuing city—not for us.
Rise up through empty floors. The condo of
your future’s there, atop this new-built husk.
Stand by the window. Waves of speckled light
spill past the bulldozed fields you hang above
and ripple out to meet the walls of night.
Learning Greek - by Kevin Hart
Joint Runner-Up
“An angel threw a man into a field,”
A balding tutor scribbled on the board
And asked us all to render it in Greek:
“I love you, Greek!,” I sighed right then and there
And hugged myself. I learned erratic verbs
While doing laundry in a grubby flat
And left as clean can be, and muddled through
The middle voice until I had it straight.
I read a Greek New Testament on trains
(Έπέκτασις would make me sit up straight)
And had a mental ache that I called Greek;
It was a language wholly made of light!
In northern Greece one day I joked about
That angel and the man. “Just over there,”
A barley farmer quietly said to me.
I’d found that reading French had made me sad,
A sorrow like the one that haunted me
While picking up the Brisbane River’s drift,
Something to do with poetry, I thought,
That came from swigging Baudelaire in bed.
So in the end I didn’t stay in love,
I went straight back to her, la langue Française,
Who slowly fondled me while whispering
Sweet nothings, serenades, and straight-out lies,
And let me feel much closer to the night,
Weird fruit bats gliding through rich, steamy dark,
Fresh jasmine, and that river going by.
Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work - by Marly Youmans
President's Choice Award and Joint Runner-Up
A flock of images allures the monk,
Seizing hold of thought, and he remembers
Unburning limbs and leaves that waved in fire,
How branches seemed to sprout and stir in flame
As if in water, how light grew to voice
And spoke to Moses, boy fished from the Nile,
Flame becoming illuminated word,
Sight and hearing jumbled as one in play.
He hesitates and feels a burning catch
At him, his fingers with the brush and paint
Floating above the vellum quires and text…
The parchment maker and the scribe have done
Their tasks and left a space for ornament
And figures framed by snow or greenery.
And so, he thinks, a naked page is like
The Uncreated who sustains the world,
The spheres, the moon, the sky pricked out in stars.
All-things are in his care who is not-thing,
Who is the blossoming causer-to-be,
Who clasps all mortal instants that to us
Are past and present like an arrow flung
Flashing from dark to light and back again,
As if a sparrow fled the ravened night
—so black when winter’s wolves gulp sun and moon!—
Through slots in stone, into the mead-hall cheer
Of feasting, bardic song, and Christmas tales,
Only to make a calligraphic dash
Across the light and toward another gap
And then be lost in inks of mystery.
What will the art in me begin this day?
The cosmos gleams with possibility:
All space, all time, the round of season-flux,
Apocalypse of birth that cracks the dark,
Hoe-scratchings at the ground once past Twelfth Night
With milk and honey, oil and yeast slow-dripped
On turf, with mass and thrice-blessed rowan cross,
And through the cycle of the turning year.
So strange it is, this sparrow-line of us,
The tick by tick of human lives ensnared
By year-long wheels of saints and feasts and fasts.
We are the sparrow with its dark-light-dark
Of arrow flight that’s fletched with pain and joy,
And we are dancers weaving in a ring
Of births and deaths and resurrection days,
Fragrant with the scents of hay and flower.
His hand trembles, the sable hair of the brush
Is blued with azurite, and now he sees
The unconsuming flames of burning bush
And hears sigla and words in hawthorn ink
Begin to scatter notes and sing for him,
Below the blanks that soon will come to be
The rich illuminations of the year,
The glass-locked stream, the flag-decked castle spire,
A prince with hound and hunting tapestry
And board with gold salt cellar and venison,
Some peasants warming their backsides by a fire,
Tunics and gowns a hoisted comedy.
He ponders the hoop of seasons and how it is
The sparrow flies in straightness like a pin…
His hand dips and he makes first marks in blue
As he dreams that linear or rounded time’s
A pin of gold and a jeweled, hammered hoop:
The ring-brooch on a cloak of endlessness,
Abundance of the uncreated light.
This page was created on 14 December 2024 and updated on 16 December 2024.