2021 Winner - Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Simone King | Joining Planet City

2021 Runner Up -Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Alisha Brown | An Ontology of Morning

first, the kookaburra

giddy for another breath to laugh upon

and then his white-feathered friends

skimming like pale stones

between gum tree silhouettes

god or something equally rare

thumbs the envelope of sea and sky

with that golden seal

and between the twitching wiregrass

a soft rock hums an invitation

to a lizard’s belly

tell me where the suffering lives

for it is not here

where eyelids bloom in their baskets

and some precious part of me

is plucked alive again

without asking

only in this shade of innocence

can my ribs remember

holding older shapes

a warrior

a waratah

a string of weeping sap

who creeps toward a possum’s tongue

or dries her eyes on a treesnake’s coiled skin

dawn cannot know grief or loneliness –

it is too busy blushing

and the native bees are too busy making honey 

to hesitate

it is now, then

that the beginning begins

it is now

that stars explode

just to land a single pearl of water on your fingertip

every dream I’ve ever had

was born between a birdcall and a bilby’s ear

that sweet pink thing

turned shy to the eastern shoreline

for morning’s kiss

2021 Winner - Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Sophie Szew | Promps For My Next Poem

2. Write a poem about how you were just distracted by the stiffness of the calluses on your feet. It reminds you of when you used to screw the balls of your feet into the carpet until your feet were nice and crunchy and the indent on the carpet looked like it Tasted. So. Good.

3. Write a poem about how staring at this computer screen gives you a migraine, but you’ve had writer’s block for far too long to risk getting inspiration from the gel inside the Advil capsules and writing about how it’s “richer than the sky.”

4. Write a poem about how the sweatshirt you are wearing is the only one you didn’t donate when you turned 18 and decided that clothes were a social construct, and that you’d rather be Eve before God shattered her shell and all that was left of it were fingernails.

 
5. Write a poem about how you haven’t had long nails in over two weeks. You still have hot pink streaks of Kiss Beauty Nail Glue on your left ring finger to remind you of when youwere married to adulthood.

 
6. Write a poem about how you smudge pink lip liner under your waterline every day

 
7. around 2 pm to bring out the green in your eyes. Your mom hates it because she thinks it
8. makes you look sick. At 14 you would’ve taken that as a compliment and then flushed your vocal cords down the toilet because that meant that you didn’t look sick all this time despite having snot dripping from the cracks in the corners of your lips.

9. Write a poem about how your messy room makes the air in your chest compress into the shape of microphone feedback. You’d let it out through your mouth, but your lips are still
tender

2021 Runner Up -Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Anna Meister| Months Until I Turn 16

               2021 Winner - CALD Section 

Ayushi Jain | He's Dead PS I'm Grieving

In the loving memory of my grandad

This world can be a gloomy place sometimes

Sometimes? I’m lying.

It doesn’t make sense when you want it to

But when it does

It’s too

diabolical

to witness.                                                             

When I have had enough of this realm

Quite too often

perhaps

I disappear.

Don’t let them  find out 

where  I am,

I am at  Khyati’s house

And appear in my babaji’s locked 2 bedroom apartment

It’s locked because it’s up for sale

Dad said,

It won’t fetch much

but there’s no use in

Letting it be     vacant

either

I can’t imagine someone else living there.

Those white walls and that murky floor

They mean  everything.

They mean nothing,

I don’t miss him

I am not fragile,

I don’t long for his 

benignity again

It’s the quarters where he died

I try not to focus on that part,

So I divert to the memories I have cosseted.

I don’t have any memories

I don’t even remember  what he looked   like

On an eroded shelf just there above

his irreplaceable cathode-ray television

Would be a wooden carton of mangoes

Or a cardboard box of cherries.

No I am not  reminded  of   him

Every single time    I sit down to   eat

Bringing new stories he heard from strangers

He was a man of the world, a traveler.

Dad do you remember that

story babaji told about that  ring merchant?

No I didn’t ask dad that.

Babaji’s dead, we don’t miss  

him.

Domestic and unpopular villages, abandoned libraries

Those were more his tea

Why do I still remember his morning yoga routines?

Just two cloves of adrak, no sugar

Saturate it with honey until the

fragrance of the tea leaves

is rendered null and void

Always and always shall I profess

To be emotion-less and devoid of anything that makes me human

But inside I am burned and full of soot

A

his          ashes

tornado 

within.

               2021 Runner Up- CALD Section 

Ayushi Jain | Gone

In the loving memory of a lost childhood

Soft toys wrapped in a black cloth

Stashed in the attic, forgotten, lost.

Or thrown away in the bin

Or left behind at the last place we declared home.

Doltish haircuts and vacuous glasses

Wide eyed and open mouthed glances at the sky

at the sound of an airplane

And whispered cursing, giggling

And good-night kisses.

A thousand flamboyant hair clips

Two thousand plastic necklaces

Three thousand loose teeth

Four thousand pirouetting aampanna glasses

Five thousand miles away, absent.

Toy cars and montessori blocks

Nani’s fragile hands knitting woolen sweaters

in the noon of a hypothermic winter

Bulbous cheeks

Tumefied tonsils

Birthday cakes and gaugeable candles

Lurking outside after dark

Unaware of some predator’s eyes.

Forgotten blood vows

Broken swings

Bruised knees and bleeding ankles and cut fingers

Dead “Best friends for life”

Dead “I’ll marry you when I get a little older”

Somewhere in the stars

Long gone jubilant innocent girls and ponytails

Dead stray kittens, trampled street dogs

Rotting mangoes and cherries

Decomposing into the ground, gone.

2020 Winner - Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Kim Waters | The Builder

Sometimes I hear the scaffolding strain,

his whistle through the plasterless rooms,

and I’m there again, seven-years-old,

watching his hands cradle a brick,

set it square, remove a spill

with the point of a diamond-shaped knife.

I remember his hair flecked with paint,

a nail purse belted around his waist,

a flat pencil, fold-up ruler

and a packet of Bex in his overall bib.

The way he’d hammer a nail, his gaze

a spirit level of concentration

as he zithered a wedge of wood with his saw.

How he’d jam one knee up against a horse,

shaved timber falling in curls

around his hobnailed boots.And the times 

he’d lift me onto his rafted shoulders

and we’d move through the whalebone rooms of a house,

him sure-footed, walking the line

of his tight-roped years and me reaching

into the open-roofed sky.

2020 Runner Up - Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Rob Wallis | The Priest

You take the steps down to our front door

one at a time, as if your knees

buckle under the weight of prayer.

The small bag you carry

for an overnight stay, clinks.

It doesn’t sound like pyjamas,

a change of underwear, a stringent

volume on the lives of the saints

you’ve struggled, for years, to emulate.

You greet both of us with a hug,

cling on much longer than we wanted,

a candle lit for an urgent need.

In the kitchen you open the bag,

produce two bottles of wine,

a bottle of whisky. Nothing else.

This is an act of generosity.

Or it measures the religious life,

the toll it’s taken on your sexuality.

You begin our meal with a prayer,

celebrate friendship, proud, and envious,

of us, a pair of beads on your rosary.

We are reduced to a congregation.

Your sermon, eased with the blood

of Christ, is a litany of anniversaries:

the day you first met my partner

in a church. The year that he left

the seminary. And after ordination,

the stations of your cross, a thorny journey

through promotions to smaller, and smaller

parishes, a snide excommunication.

                                                                                                                                      You have devoted your life to Jesus,

now you admit you wish his name

had been Damian or Angelo or Ben.

We listen in silence to this disclosure,

not surprised, but not comfortable

in this confessional, our roles reversed.

No amount of Hail Mary’s, no blessings,

no forgiveness of sins, can compensate

for the years of sacrifice, and denial.

You leave the next morning, each step

a retreat back to seclusion, each

intake of breath a whisper withdrawn.

2020 Winner - Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Jhermayne Ubalde | Mother

there are flowers in my head. they bloom between spiderweb cracks with a psychedelic sheen. honey pouring into my dreams. pollen falling onto my shoulders. you sowed weeds. little black seeds. scattered among the flowers. poison ivy. brambles. their pollen left angry red marks. they tasted like black jellybeans. like liquorice. or aniseed. you shovelled it into my throat. there was the heaving of lungs. they sprouted from my ears. they formed a noose and

whispered things. they burned my eyes so i couldn’t fall asleep. i can’t fall asleep. there were flowers in my head.

2020 Runner Up - Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Jhermayne Ubalde| Flowers

2020 Winner - Youth CALD Category

Disha Awashti | Two Worlds

Which dimension do I fit in?

The new one or the one of my kin?

I wanted the blonde hair and white skin

Like two armies raging inside of me,

Not able to decide,

Am I Australian?

Am I Indian?

Who would I be?

My roti discarded,

Because it wasn’t what the other kids ate

My name made fun of,

Because it wasn’t something like Kate

Was there something so wrong with speaking my language?

People looked at me as if it was sacrilege

I had an Indian accent

Such dissent,

Because I sounded different

Now, I look at myself in the mirror

And I think I can see myself a little clearer

Thongs and butter chicken

Barbeques and Bindi’s

I am Indian. I speak Hindi

I am Australian. I speak English.

I am me

2020 Runner Up - Youth CALD Category

Jasmin Yaxin Wu| The Princess

i want to set the record

straight about the princess.

in this story she does not

run away with the prince.

she is nine and carving initials

into the trees around the palace garden

her mother, the queen asks her

which noble prince, lord or knight

she has fallen madly in love with

and a few white lies make her so sure

it was a boy that she was thinking about

she is eleven and has begun to notice

that couples are always a pair of opposites

her mother, the queen thinks that

the princess is far too young to

understand the ways of the world

but the princess knows she is old enough to

realise why it was a girl’s face she dreamt of

she is thirteen and can say the word ally,

so she is adjacent but not part of anything

her mother, the queen believes that

the princess will soon find a gallant prince

to sweep her off her feet

however, the princess is too busy thinking

about kissing her best friend

she is fifteen and the drawbridge lowers,

as her true feelings come out

her mother, the queen considers the

rainbow to be just a phase, but surprisingly

accepts the princess’ identity all the same

the princess now understands why she

had always felt different from everyone else.

because she doesn’t want a castle

or a chest of silk gowns

she doesn’t want a kingdom

or even a golden crown

she wants to hold your hand

where everybody else can see

she wants to love without fear,

judgement or scrutiny

the word ‘gay’ begins to roll off her tongue,

and it is whispered and spoken and screamed 

to make up for all those lost years

because sometimes,

the princess doesn’t want a prince

2020 Awards Ceremony

Terms & Conditions

Competition Opens | 1st June 2022

Competition Closes | 1st September 2022

 

Awards Ceremony - Hybrid Event: 

November 20 2022

 Competition Dates

Woorilla Poetry Prize is a not for profit poetry competition run by volunteers who are passionate individuals, that believe in the power of poetry and supporting existing, up and coming and especially young emerging poets. Any assistance you can give will help grow and sustain this annual competition

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Phone | 03 59684291

Email | info@woorilla.org.au

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