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Peterloo Poets, Poetry Publishers, Calstock, Cornwall

Poetry Competition >Winning Poem

Natural Selection        

Like suns they lord it over the chaos,
The great glass orbs that light the classrooms,
The ragged-trousered rowdies splashing water,
And the tiny timid ones who cry for home.

In the next form up they have progressed
To black sugar-paper, which they cover
With yellow stars and moons, a blue strip
For the firmament, skirted blobs for mother.

Then, reading: ribboning out from mysterious
Hidden spinnerets, acrobats, they take flight,
Baby spiders, on the first miraculous thread
Across the tree of words: lustrous, infinite.

Then they are naming things: cygnet and sycamore,
Growing alum crystals and acorns,
Watching slithering spawn dissolve into
A shriggle of tadpoles, a font of semicolons,

As if to say what’s next? I am next,
Glowers Mrs Mitchell, now you are the big ones.
To you I will say divide and multiply,
For there are hard times ahead, harder even than sums.

She wipes the coloured chalk animals
From the blackboard with a swoosh, a splat.
This is our world, this milky whirl of dust,
Where we make ourselves. Now think on that.

                                           Laura Thompson
(Peterloo Poets 22nd Annual Open Poetry Competition 2006 Winner)