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2021 Winners
2021 Winner - Judith Rodriguez Open Prize
Simone King | Joining Planet City
imagines a future megacity created in response to the
climate crisis. Planet City houses ten billion people, while
the rest of the world is freed for rewilding and handed back
to Traditional Owners.
You can’t get past the darkness, morning seeping
through your only window is the night’s afterthought.
Gazing into murk, the apartment-cliff opposite flickers
awake, square-by-square with LED light. Thousands of
lives stacked – sleeping, making love, peering at
pixelated faces, arguing with parents they can’t forgive.
Soon, your daughter, swollen with life, will ascend to
join you, leaving Wurundjeri Country for good. Soon,
it will all be handed back. You imagine her standing on
her front lawn, mapping to memory what she will miss
open sky
papery Melaleuca bark
whistling Casuarina needles.
When her time comes, she will join you. A tuft of nearnothing, she will accrete to the skin of this creature/tower of recycled silicon, regret, algae, neon, heart beats and hope. Her window will frame a solar field, stolen slivers of sunlight dancing. You tell yourself she will smile, that she will think of the upside
eucalypts outside Planet City
sucking carbon to split concrete
with crowbar roots.
You wake from a sun-soaked dream and goddammit you need sky. Elevator up 165 levels to a wisp of soiled cloud. Confetti falls through searching fingers.
Yesterday, powdery paints of Holi festival exploded on screens. Laughing faces glittered with garish green, pink, yellow. Today, the rooftop air vibrates with
ommm. But your limbs ache, your stomach churns with knowing your granddaughter will not taste, will not feel
cold rush of ocean, not see
shimmering sweep of milky way.
Beside you, a gathered group weeping words fossil fuel
generation… saw great change… he was so sorry. An
urn tipped over the edge. Ash floats into confetti,
sooting pastels, spins, sinks past steel, concrete, faces
pressed against glass. Flaky remains of bones on a long
earthbound journey. They settle in the end as flecks on
algal lakes, dust on corn crops, doused in hot pink light.
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
A children’s book with salt
water taffy words reshapes
the little one’s imagination
into a discovery I’d rather not
remember but write down into a
persistent tale read to loves before
they rest at night and my
kindergarten best friend hung a dull
daylight
but gorgeous
moonlight
charm bracelet on
her rolling backpack.
For sentimental’s sake stop making
her cry before naps because she couldn’t
keep the
lightning from caressing her eardrums.
Unlike me, her gymnastic chalk
hands
grab onto the rings of the superior August
moons.
Bottles pelt her back if you see
God tell him
to smell the sweet aroma of champagne that
bubbled before the other.
Queen Victoria wears a satin silk veil to
cover her blue-light dental work and
waxy
lips that send red sparks to all the children
20 | Woorilla Poetry Prize 2020 Woorilla Poetry Prize 2020 | 21
in London and gray tree fingers grow moss
to reach up into my glass of water I get in
the middle of the night to
invade my middle
-afternoon daydreams.
Like beautiful strangers in couples looking at
lit-up houses during Christmas ornaments
you’re a boring and slow river giving me
insomnia.
Love letters from third-grade
valentines
make me feel more full than the candy that’s
attached to them.
Like snow she’s always melting from the
mountains into my glass
spaceship and
soaring into Sunday morning football layday wrinkles.
1980’s trick-or-treat vampires have
supernatural
hummingbird wings whose fluttering
rivals Tinkerbell and her blur of light
always loyal
to its heart and digital cameras that
store security
footage of the latest bank heist and I think the
robber is my neighbor’s and
I’s past lover but
my neighbor’s brother but not lover
I welcome the fire ants into my house, I let them
drink the best wine
and most fruitful dirt.
A bat hanging in an upside-down cave doubleblinded by lost weight of uneaten late night
Friday breakfast.
Imagine the leaves
shivering in the beginning
of your ear cartilage grin and 60’s
lightstops.
Screaming crickets don’t make music but noise
around our Honda we drove down yellow
flower streets.
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.
2021 Awards Ceremony
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Competition Opened | 1st June 2024
Competition Closed | 30th September 2024
Awards Ceremony - Hybrid Event:
17th November 2024
Competition & Award Dates
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