This poetry competition for young people was created as a tribute to my daughter Megan Young who died of cancer more than fourteen years ago when she was 32.

She had been a pupil at the Perse School for Girls (now the Stephen Perse Foundation) in Cambridge and went on to become an equine vet and a poet. I am so pleased to see that young people continue to express themselves in poetry, despite the hiccups of Covid and all that schools and students have had to cope with since then.

Here is this year’s winning entry by Allanah Modis.

Lost Sunset

Looking out past the flat-topped hedges,
I try to imagine what the sun might look like.
If I could see it now,
Seeping through the purple clouds
Stringy plumes, stretching evening gooey light
and
Smearing peach the sky
which at midday would toss the sun like a
plaything in blue hands.

At around five o’clock, I’d sit myself down
And begin to stare
Past the compressed square hedges,
And picture the sun.
I can almost see it now, poised in fumbling
fingers,
Ready to fall, splinter a shard encrusted casing
And let spill a molten yoke.

Yet it is eight o’clock and I am still loyally sat,
glaring over crushed cuboid hedges,
Through the muddy blackened air
And there is no sign of my sickly sweet sun,
No smell of the burnt evening breeze,
bar the tang from yesterday’s
heat of the coal fires and dry cough from a trillion
grey pipes.

No gentle sigh from the grass
As it lets itself relax in the shadow behind that
syrupy light,

No white flowers that,
Like drooping eyelids, close their petals tight,

No last breath of warmth upon the skin of the
Earth.

If it is night, I would not know,
if it wasn’t for the cold.
But yet, during some sleeps in the deepest of
dreams,
I can taste it still – my sun sizzling gently against
the purple grey sky.