Westival International Poetry Competition 2024

🌟 WESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION 2024  WINNERS 🌟  

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The results are in, and we’re thrilled to share the top three poems from this year’s competition! With a huge array of incredible entries, our judges had their work cut out for them. A big thank you to everyone who shared their words with us, and to our adjudicators for their thoughtful and generous consideration.⁠ The talent and creativity have been outstanding!  

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⁠ And we are delighted to announce that our overall winner this year was  Lorely Forrester with her poem Planting Peonies.

2nd place went to Siobhan Ward with Convalescence at the Kent Coast. 

3rd place was Laura Theis with The Listener. 

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And congratulations to our shortlist: ⁠  

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Jamie O'Halloran– Le Coeur Gastronomique 

Mai Ishikawa – Ripple  

Patrick Holloway – Those arms around your neck

Isabella G Mead – On Seeing Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Figure (Merryn)’ (1962) 

Siobhan Ward – The Woman Who Sculpts Water 

Pat Boran – Kingfisher

Kate Fenwick – Last Supper  

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Planting Peonies

I planted peonies this afternoon, I put all seven
in one bed, their colours just a daydream in my head,
my greedy eyes grasping at their leaves, watching
the sunlight tipping fresh new green to ecstasy.
Not too deep, the voices in me said – not too deep –
in case my peonies should never bloom,
but simply sleep forever, cocooned in slumber
like the princess in the keep. Imagine all that flowering
thrown away, held fast forever in the cold, enclosing earth,
fold on fold of petals simply lost, green every spring, still
only green in June, no fat round buds, no layers of crimson
silk, no cups of moony white deep-slashed with red.
For all the world like bodies gashed and bled.

Today the guns are pounding in Ukraine, and
shredding Gaza’s strip with death and dread.
The lucky, or unlucky ones have fled.
My father fought a war, but never spoke a word
of all the millions broken, and the dead,
the wasted dead. Needs must they bury them –
but not too deep – not too deep, there is no time,
and anyway, the dead will sleep most anywhere.
Unlike his pain, that, buried oh-so-deep, yet all his
life kept seeping through the words he left unsaid.

And they will never bloom, those squandered
dead. Imagine all that flowering thrown away
while myriad mothers weep, their reaping
just a pipe dream in the head. But, working in my
quiet garden-bed, treading the neutral earth around
each peony, too vividly I see what flowering came to
birth, like bursting buds, all bright and crimson red,
the billowing wounds on bodies gashed and bled.

Lorely Forrester 

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The ferries are brilliant white pills
lined up on the silvered horizon.

Lines of groynes pattern the beach,
the black stumps grave markers.

A seabird in my path takes off -
her pink feet dangle, weightless.

I pick up a shell with a hole in it.
The gulls are dropping them hard

against the concrete to force them
open and extract the body within.

The tide's on its way out, leaving
the sand saddle-smooth, bereaved.

The tide’s so far out now, I see
Moses holding back the waters,

Pharoah urging his charioteers
over the mudflats. He cries out

you’ve lost everything. I can read
the signs as well as anyone. Still,

something flutters in my chest -
this is possible, this can happen.

Siobhan Ward