2024 Open Poetry Results

We would like to congratulate all our winners and thank everyone who entered the Open Poetry Competition this year. Congratulations to Maggie Wadey for their winning entry I Dreamt My Daughter Was A Child Again.

I DREAMT MY DAUGHTER WAS A CHILD AGAIN

I dreamt my daughter was a child again
playing with her own children in the garden of our old house
and they were all three around the same age,
somewhere between nine and eleven, two girls and a boy.
This seemed at the same time both perfectly natural and inexpressibly
strange: mesmerizing, beautiful, and sad.
The children shared a certain gravity, and grace.
They were alike in features, gestures, cries, deeply immersed
in the searching, calibrating tasks of childhood as they found their place,
learned their moves, challenged their given status and made up
their future lives. And I wanted so very much to protect her
from something – my daughter, I mean – but in the dream
I was powerless either to act or speak out.
Her face, a stormy Bellini angel outlined against the trees,
was enigmatic, focused on the game, deep in the moment,
single-minded – a look I rarely see in her more adult repertoire
of haste, anxiety, her promise always to speak tomorrow,
or maybe the day after. Never now. And I comply.

Life happens as you look the other way.

Her own failures as a mother are, I know,
intimately bound up with mine when she, my only child,
great gift of my youth, arrived to find me riding high
on the full flood of life, too much taken up with her inconstant
father, careless, self-involved, my youthful years a fugue of hunger,
chasing after things unknown. And in my dream I understood
that what I wanted so very much to protect her from
was my own younger self.

I ached to fold her back inside my heart.
But one word spoken, one wrong move on my part,
and the spell is broken. So in my dream, as in my life,
I stay where I am, silent. This all seems at the same time
both perfectly natural and inexpressibly strange:
mesmerizing, unalterable, and sad.
And there on the darkening grass
my child and hers, untouched as yet by time, dance on.

2024 Winners

Our thanks also go to the shortlist team and to Dr Anthony Joseph our 2024 Open Poets Judge. Without our judges we wouldn’t be able to run the competitions. The winning entries can be downloaded and enjoyed from the table below.

Position	Title	Author	Download Link (Subject to Availability)
1st	I Dreamt My Daughter Was A Child Again	Maggie Wadey
2nd	Vltava	Emilie Jelinek
3rd	On Reading Audre Lorde At Annaghmaerrig	Partridge Boswell
Hilly Cansdale Local Prize	Vltava	Emilie Jelinek