Lily in Upper V has been awarded second prize in her age category (KS4 and 5) in the GSA’s annual Creative Writing Competition.  

The theme for the competition was ‘Dear Earth’ and students were invited to share their creative pieces on their hopes and visions for the planet.  Lily’s poem ‘Dear Earth, Mother of Intangible’ placed second in the category with students up to the age of 18.  

This is a fantastic achievement and we are extremely proud of Lily and her success in poetry writing this year.

Dear Earth, Mother of Intangible

It was just probability – the dungeon master’s dice roll,
That sent spinning, eight almost-spheres
Of which each polyhedron of hydrogen and helium,
Wrapped in a chance astral atmosphere,
Forged their own surroundings.

All of those eight, I know to be brimming with words I can’t yet write.
So I try, pragmatic, to imagine each planet as priceless as the next,
Attempting to gauge what I would give to live upon Saturn’s rings,
Or to get to know the mystery of Neptune’s every particle
And to read the stories of the stars in our sky.

Surely then, I would be able to prove
That every planet is as perfect as the next,
Its own rare variation, improbably special.
But still my human brain, inhabited by its own biassed hubris,
Can’t yet outsmart my animate heart.

And when I feel myself bleeding sorrow for a child I have never touched,
Or as the Fibonacci fern entwines between my fingertips,
I sense some divine duality – joy and pain – surging through my veins,
And I find, dear Earth,
That it is more than just the soil beneath my feet that gives your surface life.

It is the fire that injustice lights inside my fists
It is the love that binds your unlikely fauna
It is you, mother of intangible, that stuns me into a silent rapture.

So truthfully, how could I ever convince myself
That you are just a twist of probability?