Our Creative Writing Competition, “Stranded on a Desert Island,” invited young writers to explore themes of survival, isolation, and discovery. This term’s winner, Lucy Varley from Year 10 at Kibworth Mead Academy, impressed the Speak Out Team with her evocative poem, Solitude’s Shore. Lucy’s work beautifully captures the emotions and resilience of being alone on an uncharted island – congratulations!
“-and if the sun was lonely in the sky,
It shone but brighter as it cried,
And stars uncountable fled to the night,
Hid from that single, blinding light,
And the masses danced, and love was timeless,
But the sun was laughing in the silence.”
Am I not God?
A poet on the desert island,
Scratches soft soliloquies
Into the fractured hubris of the sand,
Then grit and soul, they bleed together,
And mankind is poetry, and mankind is born.
Then the poet watches as her gentle words,
Are torn away by the tides of time leaving
Infinitesimal indents in the sand.
What does God do but watch us die?
What am I but God?
God, then, is a poet on a desert island,
And I am a star, not because I blaze light but because I am alone
In the lapping shores of night.
Perhaps there are a million others,
But I
Cannot see them.
If I cut my wrist, would it drip ink onto the paper and
Poole into iambic pentameter?
What am I, but a poet on a desert island?
What am I but
God?
“-so Prometheus did not give fire,
He gave us mud with which to mire,
The brook of futile pack mentality,
In the blood, to cloak the agony,
For what was warmth before the flame?
Warmth was fellows, and warmth was chains,
But in that spark, and its hasty creation,
Was a post primate thought – isolation,
And from that moment, as the hour struck new,
Solidarity became solitude,
And from that well of independence,
Became the soul, the minds’ new dependent,
And soul could see the God’s hypocrisy,
So it found a new master, and it called it democracy.
So what did Prometheus really give us?
Soul and
Silence,
And mistrust,
All from that spark, wrought in love.
And for that
He was
Damned.”
