Poems on the Underground Competition
In 2010 we invited our youth members and the teenage alumni of our Foyle Young Poets Award and SLAMbassadors UK championship to submit poems for publication as part of the Poems on the Underground scheme.
We asked for poems on the theme of science to celebrate 350 years of The Royal Society. The Poems on the Underground editorial team were very impressed with the high standard of entries. The three winning poems and 10 commended poems are featured below. Our winners were Hattie Grunewald (18) from Barnsely, Sophie Stepehnson-Wright (19) from London and Leon Yuchin-Lau (17) from Singapore.
Poems on the Undeground Competition Winning Poems
Poems on the Undeground Competition Commended Poems
The commended poets were: Katie Byford, Sophie Clarke, James Coghill, Zainab Ismail, Beth Jellicoe, Louis Mayall, Richard O’Brien, Adham Smart, Charlotte Trevella, Lee Zhi Xin.
Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Katie Byford
The sound of Jimi Hendrix ricochets down the wires
And glances off the anvil, hammer and the drum in my ear,
Slides around the cochlea, slipping in between
The basilar membrane to the auditory cortex,
Panning round my brain and lighting it up –
My right and left hemispheres tapping along to the beat;
The pitch increases, so does my heart rate. The sound
Climbs down the frets of my neck
And plucks its way across my bones
And as I turn up the amplitude
It resonates through my skin cells, as the beats
Pulsate through my tingling skin.
I love that song.
Fire
Sophie Clarke
“Speed equals distance over time,”
you write across the perfect squares
of your exercise book:
“nb I love you.”
The fire alarm goes off. You tug
at my arm, as I apply lip balm
and await the momentous
non-fire. I want to fill the space
between arsonist and artist.
I want to breathe Pi into your hair,
whisper: “no, no, no,
no textbook covers this.”
To start-- you-- scored the peat bogs with glaiving fingers, tipped
the earthy sods of dry and malnourished grass
on their gentle heads- the roots showing like a meadow of millipede legs
thrashing the air with hopeless insect sobbing before you turned your attention from farming-- left
that ageless night of soil, to hold the night sky between two fingers: to feel it, open it
like a star-rusted can. You go on to chase
the tails of asteroids, touch a stream of cosmic dust- pluck out a single grain.
You are multi-million dollar. You are the opposite of past. You are the child grown taller than their parents- and you read like a poem that tells of the impossible sadness of stars- the refrain:
To know, to know, to know.
Determination
Zainab Ismail
not a breath
skims the palm of a petri dish
before the future spreads its fingers,
flowering unfurled
from the crystal ball,
unravelling
the elegant algebra of a helix,
criss-crossing like a cracking whip
of scarlet and blue,
switched to heal and burn
a new tattoo.
Holidays in Space
Beth Jellicoe
Space conceals itself in itself,
its beauty disguised as darkness.
I tipped my head and drank down the sky
which spread over the fields, an inky tide.
The planet appeared as a swollen star,
a gold whorl dropped in the water of night:
another world, shining far above
the whisper-quiet fields of wheat.
Space conceals itself in itself
above the whisper-quiet fields.
And I could be anyone, counting stars,
considering water and other worlds.
Rutherford
Louis Mayall
Lonely atoms now
No longer dance
In Year 8 microscopes
Perhaps we met
In bedside silicates
Perhaps we waltzed
In Turkish bath steam
Your blood sugar smiles
Sets my capillaries dancing
All my electrons
Are second-hand
Shin-deep in sand, your brother holds a skull.
You dust the beauty of a death as yet unnamed,
irregular, reveal a new age of the old. All hail
the salt-stained bone-girl. Georgian spume
subsides to something colder, less upholstered;
you're buried thirty years on, silted with laudanum.
You'd changed your church. Cliff-stark apostles
stood transfixed as men patched up your skeletons,
chipped out their names and wrote: 'extinct'.
The tide is turning, faster than you'd ever think,
or want. We're what's washed up. This is the old age of the new.
Forgive them, lord. They know not what they do.
The New Mechanics
Adham Smart
For years I dreamed in black and white,
Greek letters and explosions, the smallest pieces
of shape and weight dancing through the dark.
I lost months of sleep, yet no-one
ever asked me how I had slept. Wrapped in dripping sheets,
I wrestled nightly with the elements, a torment of theories
that broke, wave-like, on a moonlit beach.
That was me. I spent my youth fixing the perfect atom
with stiffened fingers, drawing cold breaths,
filling my lungs with chalk.
Genetics 2
Charlotte Trevella
They say that DNA is a ladder:
a spiralling staircase to heaven,
or to the empty room
between skylight and cement
where I write my poems.
What more am I than acid, than bone?
My chromosomes coil and wind,
a chemical covenant
speaking of the whorls on your fingertips,
or the birthmark below my eye.
All day I have been restless,
waiting; the distance
between each minute
stretching as far
as the miles your plane
lapped in thirteen hours.
I wonder how far the next minute
is, for the ones
whose lovers have flown past
not just merely miles, but
the distance
between life and death as well.
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