i am for
Announcing the winners of the inaugural Australia reMADE poetry competition!
Every day we have the opportunity to ask ourselves, what am I for? What moves me? What inspires me? What makes my heart soar? What does the Australia of my dreams look like? What brings me joy?
It is with great delight that we announce the winners of the first Australia reMADE poetry competition. This competition would not have been possible without the incredible work by Poet Laureate Miriam Hechtman and the three other judges Katerina Cosgrove, Gabrielle Journey Jones and Mark Mordue.
It was an absolute pleasure for judges to read the poetry and, as always with these things, incredibly difficult to choose between poems. The arts are not a place to pit issue against issue, heart against heart, and so while the judges have chosen winners it by no means diminishes or devalues any of the other entries. After all, as Alice Walker said “Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.” Our world is better for having you poets in it!
With that in mind we’re thrilled to announce the following winners (click on their names to be taken to the winning poems below).
WINNER (adults): Carly Byrne
A breakneck journey through dystopian landscapes, sci-fi scenarios, counter-culture dreams, indigenous rights and climate rebellion, this poem grabs us by the jugular and spurs us on to freedom. It pulls no punches. It is a manifesto for revolution. And it's also a wild and joyful paean to extremes: ‘secret gardens and public gardens’, ‘kaleidoscopic sea galaxy, a pink egg soup’, ‘barefoot boys with feathers in their hair.’ With irreverence and irrepressible energy, this poem urges us to open ourselves to its call.
YES! Loved it!! Loved the entire glorious, rambling, out of the box poetic offering!
“I am for revolution baby!”
WINNER (5-12 years): Victoria Munoz
A beautiful portrait of a mother, with subtle observations of emotion and detail: My mum smells like fresh juice / Coriander, lemon smooth”; “She never says bye, just remember to be kind”; “My mum smells like a battle with a little hope and she holds my hand through all.” As the writer says, “I am for writing her a song or a thank you note.”
WINNER (13-18 years): Munira Tabassum Ahmed
A terrific poem that blends a love and appreciation for Mother Nature with a child’s growing up experiences, her own mother, and a sense of unity and oneness with nature and the environment that poet makes us feel is personal, but defines as universal. The sentiments ring clear and clean from the opening and throughout the poem: “I am for mother nature in all her forms / a child’s footsteps pressed into warm brown earth / as she dances to the first song she’s ever heard.”
HIGHLY COMMENDED (ADULT): Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn
HIGHLY COMMENDED (ADULT): Bree Alexander
HIGHLY COMMENDED (5-12 years): Luka Foster
HIGHLY COMMENDED (13-18 years): Ella Avni
FURTHER NOTES FROM THE JUDGES
In the 5-12 age category - there were universally consistent poems of real quality. It was very hard to separate them and find winners. Much of the poetry was beautiful and simple and rhythmically strong, clean and true and without pretence. Older poets would be envious of this ‘skill’. Everyone who entered this category should feel proud, most especially the winners. The concern for the environment, for the value of kindness as a vital quality to be affirmed, for close friends and the love and example of mothers were a consistent highlight.
In 13-18 category – there was a natural rise in complexity, a greater emphasis on personal and cultural identity, and a tendency to be more precise or detailed about the texture of love and life. Once again kindness, the environment and the connection to and love and example of mothers were powerful themes. What distinguished the shortlisted works was an awareness by the writers of the poems as creative and nourishing acts in and of themselves.
I am for - Carly Byrne
I saw a world that looked like a science fiction poster,
A dystopian novel of mars descendants,
Barren lands under apocalyptic purple haze sky,
Slimy green waters and three eyed fish,
Abandoned corporate towers flooded the sky where the trees, there were no trees,
But it was only a dream, only a dream.
I am for people who won’t abandon responsibility for apathy,
For a world that works from the bottom up,
For mystery in our alien lands,
For myths and stories passed through generations,
For jobs in solar factories that seem alien in their techno- simplicity,
I am for secret gardens and public gardens,
Animals and animal people,
Protection of all sentient beings,
For hidden patterns in nature,
Spiral numbers that form you and me,
For fractal shaped clouds that merge with blue sky and a Jackson Pollock painting,
A whisper of origin in the mystery of life,
I am for a treaty and connecting with the land,
For adventures of young naturalists marooned by the stars,
Crystal rain fields and napoleon white glaciers,
Under blue skies enviable to other planets in deep space 1969,
Why would you turn earth into mars,
I am for the hive mind,
For the spider and the butterfly caught between freedom and a web,
For children who show us who they want to be,
Desiring empathy and yearning to break free from their seeds,
To belong to vast open space,
Wild meadows and wild, wild horses,
For movement, dance and the way she moves,
I am for sea yard emporium,
Kaleidoscopic sea galaxy,
A pink egg soup,
For layer after layer,
For the dreamtime,
The true rust of tin,
The iron folds of time,
The delicate construction of coral fortresses,
For the citizens of the reef,
Pioneering polyps in the exotic interruption,
Liquid skin that travelled space and time, the tardis of the sea,
Living art comical like a silent film, Charlie Chaplan fish, 43
I am for people have the power,
For the powerful illusion of the one percent must end!
I am for barefoot boys with feathers in their hair,
Punk girls and skater girls,
Women in doc martens with babies on their hips,
The uniform of misfits,
Men with pink, red, blue hair,
I am for new dreams of utopia,
Gotta ship shape baby,
For brave policies that don’t go weak at the knees,
For a new kind of democracy,
I am for Trans flag and Queer flag,
Indigenous elders,
Every colour of skin,
For ancient rainforests a wild virtue,
For first nations land and water,
For indigenous anthem,
Education of sorrow and joy,
I am for asylum, for being good to thy neighbour,
For phoenix to rise out of Baghdad,
For Muslims and prayer and freedom of religion,
I am for artists and poets to imagine reality,
For swallowing the bird of creativity,
For fair and decent criminal justice,
For eccentrics and vagabonds,
For the lost bohemian in winter searching for beauty, truth and love,
The basic right to have a home,
For poetry as alchemy raise consciousness,
For cosmic shelter and those who go beyond empathy,
Seats for everyone in the majestic theatre of life,
The boy was standing on stage, standing at the edge of the world,
He was glowing in the twilight of possibility,
Dylan and Hendrix in the airwaves,
Amidst revolution, freedom and a new trajectory,
He was wearing a shirt with an hourglass,
A sign of the times,
Extinction Rebellion.
I am for revolution baby!
I am for - Victoria Munoz
My mum smells like fresh juice
Coriander, lemon smooth
My mum smells like cookie dough
Songs and thoughts through the walls
Her heart is sometimes sad and sometimes light
There is no holding back.
Girl you don’t have time!
My mum hugs and kisses three times just in case you don’t feel fine.
She talks with lots of RRRRRSSSS
But she always makes everything right
She wears red and yellow and pink
because she can,
She fights with all she has,
nothing else in her bag,
She is my morning person my goodnight sleep my tide your shoes! and don’t forgot to breath!
She never says bye, just remember to be kind.
To be brave is nothing else just a smile.
I am for writing these words in wall,
To sing them all day long, while I skip the rope.
My mum smells like a battle with a little hope and she holds my hand through all.
I close my eyes in crowd and found my mum speaking at loud,
about mothers and daughters all around people sigh -is that your mum ?they ask me around.
She is my mother and she tries so hard to fight back and hard for mums all around.
I am for writing her a song or a thank you note.
I am for writing these words in a wall
Be kind that’s all-
I am for - Munira Tabassum Ahmed
I am for mother nature in all her forms.
a child’s footsteps pressed into warm brown earth
as she dances to the first song she’s ever heard -
the sound of summer rain on tin roofs,
storms and sunlight cupped in both palms.
I am for the earth’s children;
answering to the call of sunlight at dawn.
washing wounds in saltwater and sowing
sprouts of themselves throughout the earth.
I am for the women who raised us.
we were born of blood and salt,
but nurtured into water and sugar.
I am for finding beauty,
the way a mother can redefine pigment -
finding gold in all your shades of bronze.
painting beauty onto our faces with a
thick paintbrush, laden with all the power
she has gained in her lifetime.
I am for growth.
I am for stepping into everything your
mother sees in you.
I am for courage and strength.
I am for a mouthful of sugar
that can bear the taste of salt.
I am for the salt that I have grown from.
Water - Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn
I am for the smell before the storm
When clouds seep up from the ground in hot breaths, fresh
Like the lenses of the Pacifik(a) (eye)lands
Those porous reserves of underground hope
But this water is being infiltrated
Inundated by salty tears
'Climate change' is chiming PR consolation for:
colonisation.
I am for the Pasifika where my tinamatua matua lived
Archipelagoes of micro-nations where Europeans swooped (so many crumbs)
Those empires like eagles
Scratched the ground out from under people
Shipping guano across the ocean
In order to make fertile stolen land
in 'Australia'
'Australia'.
Where my great-great-grandfather murdered first people
as he drove cattle through unceded land
where now more and more rivers run dry.
I am for a future where the past is told in schools
an Australia unbuilt, deconstructed, unravelled
where violence is no longer doled out by police
I am for a place where my brother's ears didn't have to be stitched up
after he rapped at some cops
(they decided to teach the 17-year-old a lesson)
I wish for a place where the truth can be told
that doesn't just acknowledge sovereignty was never ceded
but a place where White people act on this truth
by returning the land and water
And did you know words
politesse
are not enough
against violence?
So I am for troublemakers
Strikes like the Cochabamba water riots
Where Oscar Olivera in his poet's cap
(a shoemaker) took back the keys to the city
A whirpool sending eddies and currents flowing away
from neoliberalism, against the privatisation of the most precious source
of life, sustenance, memory
I am for bowls of vinegar
left beside doorways
for protestors to soak their bandanas
against teargas.
I am for
water
fluidity
entropy
I am for - Bree Alexander
To be for us all
I am for learning and unlearning
from the past, my own mistakes
for shedding skins, feeling the pleasure
and pain of change, I am for conversations
that dance long into the night or gently
brush my cheeks in the early morning
that startle and surprise, that disrupt me
I am for questioning, challenging, seeking
for going beyond the current state knowing we
have to change our ways, to really put nature first
I am for change, ‘cos we can’t be what we were
or what we are forever and survive when
things move so quickly, I am for equality
where we all engage in these struggles
in trying to be better versions of ourselves
I am for thinking beyond the I to what impacts
us, for learning when to engage loudly or when
to step aside, to avail space and not space evade
I am for taking that I between my fingers and rubbing
it until it crumbles into tiny pieces, until it resembles
me, dispersed, part of a larger infinity, to be for us all
I am for - Luka Foster
I am for
The smell of roses
The doing of kindness
The making of love
The feeling of the waves
The colour of aqua and blue
And all of the loveable and kind secrets of the world
I am for - Ella Avni
I am for
I am for recognition, a world of diversity
representation of all in unity
I am for love and culture in the face of adversity
I am for the culture and traditions coursing through my veins
I am not threatened by my ancestors historic strains,
like a river of red I’m empowered- my passion reigns.
i am for having and giving my voice, i am for my mind igniting with flames
i am for acceptance of the one brown girl
in a sea of white
and the love of that earth skinned girl
when it’s not seen as right.
i am for that girl being loud and big,
for her soul and words to touch all
for her head to stay tall.
i am for her.
i am for poetry, as when i speak i don’t rhyme
i speak each word which rises to my mind
i let them slip off my tongue like honey from the hive
only when they are raw will i know they are mine.
i am for my words glistening with red
for my words to be more powerful than his.
i am for my ancestors who my poetry they couldn’t have read
because they didn’t know how
i am for my nene who was sold as a child
for she could not write as i know now
she could not read as i do
she could not learn as i do
she could not be as i do
because she was denied a chance to.
i am for my nene who’s words of gold comfort me,
i am for turning them red with passion,
i am for writing her story of truth
i will only know that i am done
when her name is uttered behind tooth,
i am for her.
