Winners 2007 : Third Prize

Sophie Mackintosh

Ysgol Y Preseli, Crymych

On Illumination and Reasons to Fly

and I turned to him with eyes exuberant
all burning up in realisation “we’re behind
but not too late – we can just go, hitch our packs to
sunburnt shoulders (don’t mind the pain
in fact positively embrace it –
belated besotted blistered revolutionaries
you see that’s what we are, what we need to be)”
tongue frenetic and prophetic with the ultimate truth
and all the secrets that suddenly blaze and curl, unfurl
across the sky – “there is a WORLD, a whole WORLD
and it is there for the taking, drenched in technicolour
and dreamscape with all that aloneness and peace
the likes of which we have never seen, and all the rest,
we don’t even know we’re alive –
are we going to trip somnolent along these streets
forever more – like snagged records
repeating the chorus until you feel sick; or déjà vu
with its sense of (something wrong something missing)?
we have to fly before we are too old to be crazy –
lets run before they root our feet right into the ground”
spoke parallel to the manic beating of my heart,
its beautiful hallucinatory arrhythmia
inducing this clearness, the reason for flight set out
like sequence “can’t you see it’s written everywhere?”
joyous palms flung skyward – look to the clouds
“oh we are going to escape and find it all;
we are going to find everything”