Scientific wonder in verse
Brilliant Poetry is an international competition that invites people from around the world to express scientific wonder and discovery through verse.
First prize £1000 — Second prize £500 — Third prize £250
By melding science and art, Brilliant Poetry seeks to ignite a worldwide appreciation for the boundless creativity that underpins scientific exploration and innovation.
1ST PRIZE
Impressions
by Kathryn Spratt
Ephemera like fishes, ferns, and childhood days should live to decay,
their dappled glory melting into indistinct detritus for tomorrows’ nourishment,
but this is not always the case.
Near the school parking lot, I find a student, age 18, crouched in river rock.
He reaches beneath a shrub then meets my gaze and cracks
a crooked smile, knowing I presume stashed contraband.
“Look,” he says, extending his hand.
Hair blazing in afterschool sun, we study his discovery—
half a dozen fossils in a single stone.
“Rocks like this are everywhere,” he says at last.
He moves to toss it down until some old amygdaloid specter stops him cold,
and he slips it gently, very gently, into his pocket.
Strata break: two heart halves fall apart,
exposing the crisp outline of a child toting treasure.
I wonder who first showed him fossils and if they were kind.
I hope they were kind.
It’s hard to remember if this is the boy whose father died,
whose father’s alive but can’t know that he’s gay,
or whose father left his mother so poor, she can’t afford to ink over his name.
Does it matter?
Casting organic life in stone takes trauma:
catastrophic sediment crushing fronds and fins mid flourish,
arresting total openness—absolute trust in gentle sun and gentle sea.
Silt conglomerates and hardens over the tender newly dead
until brittle shards host shadows
of leaves seeking light,
fins testing tide,
small arms extending to show and give and receive,
all frozen in their needing.
2ND PRIZE
Imagine
by Aileen Cassinetto
It is 1919, and I am older
than my great-grandmother, parturient
and silent, as her husband responds
to an unyielding desire to be free
and sovereign. Imagine a scene
where the rules apply to everything.
In 1919, she must have feared
influenza and her husband’s
inconstancy more than any army
of colonists. Her past, my future,
relative and happening at once.
Swear not by the fickle moon, I tell her,
except when it covers the sun completely.
Imagine a scene, an astronomer
measuring the positions of stars
as the moon casts its shadow on earth to prove
a new theory of gravity. The rain
abated, clouds have dissipated,
bees stopped buzzing, birds went to roost. Over here,
that scene is now, photographs will be taken
proving that starlight bends as it passes
by the limb of the sun. Like my great-
grandmother bending under the pressure
that is her husband’s orbit as I perceive it.
She and I are moving at different speeds.
Time slows down the faster I go.
Imagine a scene, I’m holding the most
precious thing, and in this nowhen, I’m not
running, not free-falling. I’m standing right
where I always wanted to be, farther
from the dying days of distant stars.
Imagine a scene, forces of nature
weakening in a universe
that’s expanding faster perhaps
than even light can traverse it.
Somewhere the future is happening,
a wrinkle—fickle and unfolding.
My heart, from beat to beat, knows only
that I am holding the most precious thing.
Time speeds up as I imagine this scene.
3RD PRIZE
The Valency of Blue
by Sangeetha Balakrishnan
The blue-footed booby—
I have only ever seen it online.
The bird—marine, Galápagan—waddles
like a rotund pregnant king would.
The bird, unfazed, lets humans close,
so begat the epithet ‘stupid’.
Gets the blue of its feet
from carotenoids.
Gets its catch—sardines, anchovies, herring—
torpedoing into the Pacific.
Gets its mate
going all in, wooing.
In the beginning is the strut;
the blue of the feet—the fit fiddle and the fine fettle—
opens the spiel.
The neck stretches next; the bill and the tail point
skyward. Wings spread.
Guttural noises orchestrate
the serenade.
Littoral tchotchkes turn into gifts:
a stalk, a stone, a sliver of plastic.
The Galápagan beaches
contain tonnes more than slivers and shards and specks of plastic.
Anxiety comes in a cascade
barreling through beaches of Hawaii, Peru and the Andaman.
There, plastic domesticated natural debris—
fused with it,
got named: plastiglomerate.
Solemnised by fire and human folly,
this union—the plastic rock—
is a slow juggernaut.
I fear, on Galápagos,
someone will soon strike plastiglomerate.
I fear, on Galápagos, this ‘stupid’ bird will
peck at a piece of this plastic plague
to court its mate.
I fear, someday on Galápagos,
the blue in the plastiglomerates
will blight
the blue in the blue-footed booby.
2024 KEY DATES & PROCESS
——— 21 March 2024 ———
(World Poetry Day)
Three-month submission period opens.
——— 21 June 2024 ———
Submissions close at 23:59 BST (British Summer Time)
The organising committee compiles a longlist from the entries (~30-40 poems).
From this longlist, the judge selects a shortlist of 10 standout poems.
The judge determines the first, second and third prize winners.
——— October ———
Winning poets are notified, and preparations for the announcement and promotion of their work begin.
——— 10 November 2024 ———
(World Science Day for Peace and Development)
The top poems are published in The Brilliant.