Judges Comments
This category is perhaps the hardest to judge as there is such a range of experience. A twelve-year-old might see a very different world to a seventeen-year-old, and that is something I tried to hold in my mind while I was reading the poems. Again, the quality of work submitted was extremely high, with a real sophistication around how the poets interacted and explored the theme. The poem Under the Shade of History, which received a special mention managed something that is very difficult to do: it is a poem that expresses a historical pain with a gentle touch, moving through different time points and locations without losing the reader. This is a skilled poet. The other special mention in this category, The Garden Inventory, is a hymn to a future garden expressed through the spaces and marks left behind by people. We, the reader, never get to see any specific children in the garden, only the spaces where repeated joyful activities and love have left their marks – smudged chalk drawings, a worn garden seat, a battered tartan blanket. This is a very clever way of capturing joy. The winner of this category: The Field Grows Us, caught my attention with this wonderful first line: The football field is a garden, though no one says it out loud. It really sets the poem up for an exploration of the delicate in the midst of the muscular. The similes and the attention to the way the poem holds nature as a standard by which human growth can be measured is very striking.
Winner
The Field Grows Us – Chioma Nwabufoh, Camden
The football field is a garden, though no one says it out loud.
Grass trimmed sharp as memory, chalk lines like boundaries we learn to live inside.
Cleats break soil like shovels, turning earth into breathless hope.
We plant ourselves in formation.
We wait for the whistle like seeds waiting for rain.
The ball arcs — sun-bright — a traveling season.
Coach speaks like weather:
storm, calm, storm again.
We grow under pressure.
Our sweat waters the field.
Our shouts scatter like birds.
Every tackle is pruning,
every sprint is a root searching deeper.
The field remembers us.
Grass bent where we fell.
Divots where we tried again.
We huddle — a small circle of belief —
and it feels like a greenhouse:
warm, crowded, necessary.
The play unfolds.
We move as one body.
We bloom, or we break, or we become something between.
After the game, we walk off carrying dirt in our socks,
stains up our shins, hearts pumping green.
And I think:
Maybe we are not just growing on this field.
I wrote this poem to show how the football field can feel like a place where we grow, not just where we compete. Being on the field teaches patience, trust, and how to get back up after falling. It’s like a garden, but instead of plants, it’s our teamwork that develops. The field changes us, and we change it too.
Maybe the field is growing us.
Special Mentions
The Garden Inventory – Muskan Kumari, India
In spring the garden makes its own litany:
snowdrops stitch white commas into the dark.
A robin rehearses the day’s punctuation,
and the chestnut learns the slow pronunciation of green.
I kneel like a reader with dirty hands,
fingers memorising the grammar of roots,
turning over small sentences where bulbs have slept.
There are debts here — to bees, to rain, to compost —
a ledger of patient economies: rot becomes sugar,
leaves rewired into new leaves, a slow translation.
The fence keeps the argument with the wind,
the path offers its grey spine to my hesitant feet.
A child’s marble is buried beneath thyme, a silver comma,
and in the warm hollow of a pot, a verb — tomato — tries itself on.
Neighbours trade stories at the gate like cuttings,
one laugh clipped, another layered clear as moss.
At dusk the garden becomes a map of small urgencies:
the cat, a constellation; the slug, a wet thread of consequence.
I name what I cannot save — beetle, bud, the unripe apple —
and set down a cup of tea like an offering.
We are all borrowers here: the robin, the root, the night.
When frost comes, it reads the margins in silver,
correcting the boldness of summer, editing our claims.
Still, come March, a single white bell will unmake the winter’s footnote,
and I will know what the ledger means: to keep, to return, to begin.
Under the Shade of History- Maya Y, Australia
The garden keeps time better than any clock,
Not hours or chimes, but rain and heat
And birds that come and go with seasons.
Each seed a story, each leaf a memory
Pressed into clay and dust, and
Earth that holds footsteps longer
Then concrete ever could.
Banksias and wattles sing in the breeze,
Fragrance thick with histories,
Of Dreaming told beneath the shade of bush,
Before ships arrived and never left,
Before flags were planted under Eucalyptus.
The songlines were drawn before maps were forced,
Before land was owned, sold, and cleared,
Before fires were feared instead of understood,
And before forests learned the bite of chainsaws.
Before weeds and feral foxes, before drought,
Before the air burned faster than we could care.
Yet, I listen, and hear the garden hum
Soft as spinifex in wind, and harsh as cicadas at noon:
A plea, a promise, that the Earth remembers
What we have undone.
I love this land, and yet know that
To cherish the garden is not enough;
To be here is to owe, to speak, and to act
In the Australian garden, I stand, a guest,
Breathing borrowed air, but my heart is planted here,
And my hands are aware
Of roots that are not mine, yet intertwined.
Of stories I carry and debts I cannot escape.
Finalists
After the Gate – Khushi Kumari, India
After the gate, the day opens like an unpaid letter.
Wheels of light spool through the clematis.
A watering can remembers the shape of water.
I listen for the small politics of leaves —
how each blade negotiates with sun and shadow.
An old spade leans against the shed like a tired apostle,
its mouth powdered with the dust of previous sermons.
Slugs leave calligraphy no one requested.
Between beans, a moth folds itself into a private umbrella.
The gardener’s voice is a low weather, counting out seeds.
We plant apologies and expect fruit.
The fence holds up a curtain of pigeons and propositions.
In the compost heap, yesterday becomes an unstated vow.
Roots trade rumours in the dark, urgent and quiet.
A single pear hangs like an opinion that will not soften.
Children have taught the bud to be brazen; it blushes.
Evening runs a finger along the trellis, tucking in shadows.
I press my palm to a stone and hear the earth say yes.
A fox passes with the slow authority of an unread book.
Night arranges its lamps—one here, a moth there—then leaves.
We close the gate, pocketing the day’s loose change of light.
Tomorrow the soil will make its own decisions about memory.
For now, I fold my hands around the cup; steam is a small treaty.
The garden keeps nothing forever but keeps teaching me how to wait.
Press On, Press Deep – Harshit Malavaliya, India
Don’t you talk to me of petals, all soft and new. Come down to my dark. I have work for you.
I’ll show you stones that refuse to break,
and the root’s slow, blind ache. I’ll show you the worm’s gentle, constant crush.
I remember the sting of every rain,
the hurt of every footfall’s press.
I held the seed that tore itself in two,
reaching for a sun it never knew.
I am where endings start to begin.
The fallen leaf, the broken stem
I pull them into my quiet, black heart
and whisper one thing, a forgotten art:
Press on. Press deep.
The only way out is through.
But up above, my garden scorns your neat design. It loves the rose’s wild, defiant climb,
Real life is gnarled, twisted, and bent,
a glorious, tangled dissent.
Beneath my skin, roots dream alone,
ignoring the gardener’s sterile tone.
The poppy remembers an ancient, violent mine. The foxglove offers a dangerous, lovely sign.
I came here for peace, for a tidy mind,
to leave my own tangled thoughts behind.
I found a mirror, a chaotic, raw truth
not an old woman’s calm, but the fury of youth.
The lavender hums a low, drunken tune,
the ivy chokes the fence by noon.
And the dirt beneath my nails still sings its creed: Press on. Press deep. The only way out is through.
In My Future Garden – Gracie Chapman- Birmingham
In my future garden there will be dancing in hose streams
in my future garden there will be skimmed knees and neon plasters
In my future garden there will be flower crowns on every head
In my future garden there will be chalk drawings smudged on every concrete surface
In my future garden there will be teddy bear picnics with a battered tartan blanket
In my future garden there will be nights spent under the stars
In my future garden there will be bug hotels built by little fingers
In my future garden there will be a play structure carved with initials
In my future garden there will be bare berry bushes and juice coated fingers
In my future garden there will be a seat worn into the tallest tree
In my future garden there will be so much love
On the Management of Perimeters – Diya Matreja, India
I sense your weight before you breach the wire.
Soil shifts. Beetles scatter under your shadow.
roots brace, capillaries retract.
You kneel, gloved, plucking what you name weed.
Your knee compacts my crust, leaves a dent that will not last.
Your watering can drips glyphosate and metal into the root-web.
You wrinkle your nose at ammonia, miss the feral rot beneath.
Scissors click. The metal dulls faster than your resolve.
Stems severed do not protest; neither do I.
Leaves curl, brown, collapse into the damp.
They reenter the cycle. You never hear them.
You count weekends. I count winters, droughts, infestations.
My ledger: stone, root, the accumulation of loss.
You bury bulbs, think of legacy. I digest intentions as readily as bone meal.
Names, fences, intentions—these rot faster than tree stumps.
You add fertilizer, wrinkling your nose at rot. I metabolize what you resent.
I hold nitrogen, leach the excess. The rest seeps into groundwater, unbothered.
I divide what you give, erase what you forget.
Your tending disturbs, recurs, fades. I adjust; you repeat.
You believe in improvement. I believe in equilibrium.
Pressure is pressure: pruning or neglect. Both compact the earth.
When you leave, the pressure disperses. Silence settles, roots rearrange.
I digest all you leave—tags, stakes, compost, memory.
My boundary shifts. I overrun wire, stone, intention.
I do not remember you. I do not erase you. I continue.
I persist. I am amended, not ended.
The Geography of What is Tended- Areeba Arjani, Canada
No one tells you the garden is a map.
You learn by walking it slowly,
by noticing where nothing grows
and understanding why.
There are places I do not water,
corners where soil has learned
to stay quiet,
where roots practice patience.
Every garden is an act of decision:
what to pull,
what to forgive,
what to leave buried.
Beneath the neat rows,
the earth keeps records
failed seeds,
forgotten seasons,
nothing truly wasted.
I move like a careful editor,
pruning what reaches too far,
calling restraint wisdom.
But growth is an argument.
Vines test fences.
Roots redraw boundaries.
If this is care,
it is also surrender.