2024 Shortlist
Haiku
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Sonnet
✎
Free verse
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Villanelle
✎
Limerick
✎
Cinquain
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Haiku ✎ Sonnet ✎ Free verse ✎ Villanelle ✎ Limerick ✎ Cinquain ✎
"I was happily stunned by the quality of the work and the breadth of the chosen subject matter. As I read, I made notes about each poem, and placed a check mark in the margin next to the titles of those that moved me emotionally in their approach to science. On subsequent readings, I struck through some of my first check marks, added new ones in a different color, or tacked on an extra check to poems that continued to stir me even though they were by now familiar. This process yielded my top ten choices, and likewise three out of the ten deserving of special mention. I found it challenging to rank the top three in gold-silver-bronze order because each of them stood out in its own unique way, testifying to the exceptional quality of the entries overall."
Dava Sobel, judge
On First Looking Into Dirac’s Quantum Mechanics
by Joseph Conlon
No show; no poetry, no eloquence.
Lines of austere unpolished truth unroll
On logic-chiselled tracks. A sneaking sense
Of felt emotion flits then fades. The whole
Of human culture is reduced to this:
Evolving quantum states of phi and psi
Churning unceasingly down the abyss
Where Greek and Roman classics come to die.
From death comes life; these cold equations change
To living fire, as algebra unfolds
To understanding. Symbols rearrange
And make the Megas Basileus that holds
Our universe in thrall. Its chthonic roar
Razes the squeaks of Homer's village war.
Hold on tighter now (A cicada story)
by Fanni Barocsi
As nymphs, we burrow underground,
and dream of youth in darkness.
By and by we move as one,
to transcend form,
shedding our guise of juvenescence,
reborn as creatures built to fill silence with song.
A serenade composed of rapid buckling,
unbuckling,
our abdomens hollow,
our membranes ribbed.
In a canopy of green,
high above the plant roots we once suckled,
we taste finality.
Our wings overlap,
lattice framed pleasure,
writhing against the blood-red glow of a setting sun,
we sacrifice all we are for the generation to inherit the earth underneath.
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
to prove a new theory of gravity.
Show me again how 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.
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.
Voyager 1 has a midlife crisis
by Luca Fois
I lean into the vastness of this wasteland,
foretasting the silence and respite to come.
I build words with numbers to tell you a story
you can’t compute: I played hula-hoops
with Saturn; I still wear the Missoni sweater
Jupiter gifted me. I learned the planets
movements in space, I finally go slow
and choose my pace. Our distance
keeps on growing. I hear my brother is ok and I am
not. My heart drains fast, void-rust eats
my veins. Your picture close to my heart,
a tiny blue dot, far away. I won’t see you again.
My eyes fill with cosmic drops, and I inexorably drift
towards tendrils, tentacles, the unknown.
Muscae Volitantes
by Caitlin Kotula
Every day, I wake and swim in aqueous
humour—jolt to chase the flies in my
peripheries, pinching neck and optic
nerve. I cannot venture further into my
Self. Mirrorless lens shudders, shutters
close. I swim again with the mayflies.
Time is programmed into the telomeres
of my days, arcing with the setting sun
till its iris melts and my vision clouds.
A moribund sky presses mayfly to
cornea; shadow-wings fuzz and fuse
like oshibana, filtering my view. I shed
a wish and coax it from my tear duct,
blow it to the wind, watch it fly away.
The Schiehallion Experiment
by Thomas Halliday
They say this mountain guards the underworld.
That fairies lure men here to lose their way.
Then Hutton came, and Burrow, Maskelyne.
They hung a lead upon a dangling line.
And watched as, slowly, round it gently whirled,
As did, above, the turning Milky Way.
They stilled the weight, and stars revealed which way
Was down, and how the thread ought to incline
And overcome the mass of all the world.
The line itself was lured, the world to weigh.
Catenation
by Aditi Mishra
Starved
distended stomachs fed withheld emotions.
I recall these pregnant rats -
locked away for experimentation.
The well-fed maternal ones,
licking and grooming their pups
and the scraggly miserable mums
with rationed carbon.
Rationed carbon, restricted diets,
simulations of an uncertain world.
The glucose sensors in her veins
will pass on these anxieties -
to her unborn pups.
Greener pastures return -
but DNA still recites edicts of anxiety and starvation,
odes to an uncertain world.
I glance at my mother
and kiss her for unspoken affection.
She knew no better,
inadvertently poisoning the well of life
with her maternal concerns.
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.
Flocking
by Micaela Martínez
The sun goes down,
I walk to the park.
It’s children’s day and a clown
does magic under the paradise tree.
A child looks at the clown
attentively and says:
that’s not magic.
The children stop watching,
they all rotate together, they all move
to another tree.
I don’t get to hear
the explanation the child seems
to give, the hands moving,
the gestures.
The starlings began
their round in the air,
they take away all the voices,
they give them back as if they were
a loudspeaker.
Their turns surround us,
my neck rotates,
tries to guess
the direction of their flight,
the figures forming
a wave.
A murmur spreads,
before my eyes that looks like
magic.