kateedgertrust

Elisa Prattley – Howick College – 1st

June 29, 2023

I call it poetry because I’m scared to sing,
yet I act like I could be music’s next thing.
I can’t read sheet music and I don’t play guitar,
but I can write a story in semblance of a song.

I’d like to compose a beautiful melody,
woven together with lovely stories
and played for people to sing-along
like they’re reliving the memories
euphorically.

I listen to the radio
and I hear the voices of music flow
into my heart and through my veins
swirling my world like a hurricane,
lifting me off my feet and into space,
daydreaming the power of music awake.

It’s not just sounds or voices or notes,
and doesn’t get played without being heard.
It feels and it hurts and you hear the words
that speak to you emotionally when others don’t.

I scream and dance and I sing to romance songs
like I wasn’t crying to Lewis Capaldi the morning long.
As I sit on the school bus or clean my room,
music plays (Harry Styles on queue).

We’re always trying to escape.
Find a distraction to daily woes.
Something to free our shoulders from the weight
of having to live outside fairytales.

Elisa Prattley
Howick College

Xi Li – St Cuthbert’s College – Finalist

Quivering arrow.
Taut bowstring discharges, and sings.
Its pulse strikes my hands,
and trembles a bashful beat.
A symphony in each breath.

 

Xi Li
St Cuthbert’s College

From the author:
I crafted my tanka to express the nature of music because tanka’s syllabic limits allows me to capture its nuance, where each word is vital. While tanka and haiku both share syllable limitations, I chose tanka for its emotional depth. Interestingly, tanka translates to “short song,” echoing the musical sensation I felt through a drawn bowstring.

Shae-Lee Bond – Bay of Islands College – Finalist

In the realm of melodies, a magic unfurls,
Music, the language that shapes my world.
With harmonies and rhythms, it paints a scene
Stirring emotions, where dreams interven.

Through symphonies and ballads, it finds a way,
To touch my soul, in colours that don’t fade,
It speaks of joy, of love, and of despair,
The highs and lows, it’s always there.

When darkness lingers, and shadows grow,
Music lights the path, a celestial glow.
It lifts me up, when i stumble and fall,
Whispers of hope, it weavers through it all.

In its embrace, I find solace and peace,
A sanctuary where worries find release.
It resonates deeply, with stories untold,
Unlocking memories, as they unfold

With every beat, my heart finds its sway,
Music’s enchantment, guiding the way.
It unites cultures, transcending all bounds,
A universal language, where unity resounds.

From classical symphonies to pulsing beats,
Music creates connections that cannot be beat.
It shapes my world, a symphony divine,
In its melodies, my spirit finds its rhyme.

So let the music play, in moments grand or small,
For it shapes my world, encompassing all.
With its power and grace, it sets me free,
Music, the essence that defines me.

Shae-lee Bond
Bay of Islands College

Layla Woodland – St Cuthbert’s College – 3rd

Drop the Diamond

Drop the diamond…
Click…
The buzz of a turntable, the scratch of a needle
Open up portals, expansion of the thoughts, flesh and spirit.
Their beats so deep, they sink you
Under,
Growth,
Water,
Ground.
Sound.
It’s the pulse that breathes you back.
Back to neurological nebulas, black holes of bass, Saturn’s rings of guitar strings.
Shifted by mere echoes of time without linear pattern.
Emergence and departure harmonised,
Seen only through the awakened eye of painters of the stars.
This hallucination of the senses,
Taste the sweat soaked stage,
The blood of blistered hands.
Taste the tears expressed through strained throats,
Reflecting past lifetimes and those yet to be lived.
Through Pulsing,
Through Beating,
Drifting,
Drifting,
Click
You have been enlightened.

Layla Woodland
St Cuthberts, Auckland

From the author:

Drop the diamond is a poem enlightening the audience about how music is within all of us and shapes our personal world shown through the extended metaphor of “dropping the diamond” on a vinyl record beginning our musical journey through our lives.

Ivy Lyden-Hancy – Papakura High School – 2nd

August 8, 2022

Te Māori disciples of the rapture

I have feared ihu karaiti since I have learnt of the rapture
when te kore will make its journey back home
Ranginui will make its way to papatuanuku
And Māori will join the celestial
in this time
heavens trumpets will unearth oral korero
our body’s turning to vessels of the past
rising as unmoved time capsules
in the presence of weeping wahine o te atea
we are all weeping
as waka sink through quills of Biblical text,
gods disciples wade through awa
Tangaroa becoming familiar with foreign vessels
Sovereignty slowly losing its meaning through blistered history
papatuanuku weeps through confiscation of tapu land
our tupuna weep at the loss of mana to colonial constructs
For those who foresee the future, this is an ode
To the Maori disciples who have fought for te ao Marama
3 wise men will wake out of te paepera tapu

one will bring taonga
one will bring harakeke
The last brings the kereru

these gifts are given in the womb of Māori wahine
Birthing gifts of whakapapa
Back to the findings of Kupe
where our bodies will rest
Aotearoa
unearthed
in the between – te po

Ivy Lyden-Hancy
Papakura High School

From the author:

Kiaora Ko Ivy toku ingoa, this poem is about my overwhelming love for being a Māori wahine in modern day New Zealand. It conveys how colonialism affected our country, under the influence of Christianity. I utilised the 3 concepts of te kore,te po and te ao marama to bring these concepts to life. Being Māori is my passion and it drives me every day to do better and succeed. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Isabelle Lloydd – St Mary’s College – Highly Commended

August 6, 2022

Scribbler

Words
make my heart pitch, tip from its ledge,
warm meals of
paper and ink and plastic dustcovers.
We’ll be lifelong friends, swear it.
Without you I am muted,
feelings decay in my throat’s
dark chute.
Try to weave words, drop stitches,
turn the chalky silence of pages
to life.
I write until streetlights blink on,
shape you to dispel shadow, let in the sunlight
regurgitate
sadness and beauty.
Friends of ink and paper,
when the story trips, cuts open
its knees
and the words I fill you with
die out,
you leave.
Writing suffuses my mind with life’s
tackle,
drips from me, open wounded.
I’ll knit a daisy chain of letters, breathe clearer.
You are timorous soldiers,
dislocated from your homes and
herded away in emails,
disfigured by rejection and glory.
I crank the dials, try to brew
magic, medicine,
till fingertips ache, go numb.
I neglect the world for the misshapen
scraps of ideas,
the inklings which leak from
my head’s crevasses.
Vowel sounds and
grammatical placeholders,
embryonic and
delicate as snapped twigs.
To breach physical definitions,
my pen is never unpoised.
The writer in me

never turns off her light,
nor lays her head on the desk.

Isabelle Lloydd
St Mary’s College, Auckland

From the author:

The poem “Scribbler” examines my relationship to writing and to language itself. It seeks to articulate the emotional bond between writer and fruit, and the fixating pull of this expressive form. The poem’s name suggests the idea that my writing is always unfinished, imperfect, for constantly I learn and change.

Erica Hu – Diocesan School for Girls

August 5, 2022

Born into this World

Born into this world,
Where lines segregated land
Somehow, among these lines,
I lost my place in this world,
My home was cut into two –
Half in aotearoa,
Half in China.
Chinese words used to be the cushion I fall back on
When English became too much.
But the longer I spent in Aotearoa,
Chinese morphed from a comfortable pillow,
To a foreign, dusty object sitting on a shelf,
Rusting away with time.
I had not realise that English had become my cushion
Until my first reflex to answering my parents
Was a “what” in english.
Walking around the house in barefoot,
Speaking English to my sister,
Choosing to eat at cafes instead of Chinese restaurants,
My own culture is slipping away from me with time…
… almost…
Except when my culture unravels
away from me into strings,
It never really unties entirely,
Because my parents ingrained
And tied the complicity of the Chinese culture
into my identity like a Chinese knot,
Tight but unbreakable.
My mum’s homely Chinese cooking every night
On the table after I come home from school,
That fragrance that takes me back to China,
And my dad calls in Cantonese “sek fan la”.
“Dinner’s ready”.

Erica Hu
Diocesan School for Girls

Isha Davies – Michael Park School

August 7, 2021

Porcelain Skin 

I could admire you forever
Running my hands down your skin
Through your hair
Tracing your tattoos
Everything about you is a work of art.
We’ve found a new way
A kind of New York movie romance
Its as if you’re undressing me with your eyes
And pulling me in through your smile
For it’s not all tangled and messy
Nor a delusion of happiness
I see pure love and joy within your glances
It’s as if everything you feel is what I feel
Like we’re interlinked
We talk for hours and hours
Our souls mixing and binding together
You saved me
Pulled me back to life
I could never bear to hurt you.
As porcelain hits the ground it chips into a million pieces;
And once broken
it’s almost impossible to fix.
I could never break your porcelain skin
Nor would i ever want to
I found a light in you
And i hope for the life of me it never fades
only remaining besmirched on me like a coffee stain
at the bottom of a porcelain tea cup.

Isha Davies
Michael Park School

Zainab Bandukwala – Epsom Girls Grammar School

August 6, 2021

The joys of a goodbye

Gentle drops descend as she
gasps for air,
each breath sings a shaky melody.

The sun rises to bid farewell;
her carriage awaits,
distant, beyond the sheltered gates.

Her body trembles with joy as she steals
a final look at the piles of bricks,
which had witnessed her blossom.

The tall buildings stop her from
crumbling, commanding her aching heart
to keep beating with pride.

The wind whispers empty promises of
return, pricking at the gallons of emotions
gently tucked within her armoured skin.

Kia kaha — they chant,
but her face was already misshapen. Carved by a river of tears.

To the place that shaped her
into a woman —

how could she ever say adieu?

 

Zainab Bandukwala
Epsom Girls Grammar School

Gurmehar Bajwa – Ormiston Senior College, Auckland

Crafted by the angels, godsent
He cannot walk. He cannot speak.
A heart so pure, so innocent
It is the little joys that he seeks.

A simple tune,
Causing joy to flood into his world like a typhoon.
Calling his name,
Resulting in joy you can capture and frame.
Giving my hand,
Triggering his smile to grow and expand.

Piece by piece, I sculpt his wings, allowing him to soar through the air.
One bright light shines upon many pieces of myself; chandelier.

Staring into the mirror,
His radiance stealing the shimmer of the sunlight.
I reconsider,
A lesson being taught, raising my spirit o so bright.

Joy is sewn into the fabric of our worlds,
Bundles of joy buried everywhere, pearls.

We all possess the maps to these treasures,
Leading to joy of immense measure.

But be weary, the compass is within, only shall we discover it first.
With this in mind, we will traverse.
Much like my friend, living unrehearsed.

His wings now full of feathers,
Equipped for all weathers.
I rest my tools,
For my heart shines bright like a jewel.

Mudita.

 

Gurmehar Bajwa
Ormiston Senior College

 

From the author:

The poem name is Muditā. (Sanskrit) means joy; that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being. This poem is about my close friend who has diverse needs. Over the years, I have been with him, helping him grow and live to the fullest. For me, his joy and journey bring me joy. From him, I have also learned a few important lessons in life about joy, which I think we can all learn from. We should take pleasure in the little joy’s that life brings to us. We can all experience joy, for it is everywhere if we open our hearts and minds to it.