• Home
  • Conditions of Entry
  • 2014
    • Keeping up appearances
    • Gracious
    • A man’s world
    • A violin solo
    • Duteous
    • Life is fun
    • The obligation
    • We’ll cross that bridge when we get there
  • 2015
    • WW1
    • Like so many shadows
    • Poem: 1-1
    • Sunrise
  • 2016
    • black and blue like night
    • Ghost of the past
    • The girl sitting next to me
    • Voyage from home
    • Home for the lucky
    • Dear people of Syria
    • Home as a platypus
    • Beginning again
    • Curled up with a book
    • Is this shack my home?
    • Layers
    • Father from Mother Country
    • Ruby Glade
    • Clouds
  • 2017
    • Headlights
    • Morning
    • The Summer House
    • Poem
    • Morning
    • Morning Poem
    • The Caledonian
  • 2018
    • Chrysalis
    • The Innernet
    • A story for you, love
    • Dysfunctional Placentae
    • A Blank Canvas
    • Untitled
    • A stardust puzzle
    • Holey
    • to the spider on my ceiling
    • Triple-sunned sky
    • Dunedin
    • St Clair
    • The Esplanade
  • 2019
    • Overcoming grief in the form of birds
    • Think White
    • Candy floss skies
    • Book Fish
    • Body bags on the beach
    • Life comes life goes
    • The Survival

Dunedin Secondary School Poetry Competition

Think White

Think candescent.
The way light from a hidden source
dances across this simple table,
forks, plates, a single bowl,
holding fruit, while the artist holds us captive
by the white of our eye,
strokes of blue, orange, purple,
trapped in the blank of the table sheet
and colours’ hearts beat, open their throats,
cloudy ice melting on the tongue,
the sweet perfume of summer fruits.

Think ailment
being in a room, this uneasy,
so perfect, yet everything off balance,
objects and shadows, seeping together
that table, threatening to overthrow
its contents onto the ground
shards of glass, bruised apples, squashed pear
at your feet.
The artist’s wife lets out a gasp
in the white of the walls, the figure
shuffles out of focus.

Think gleam,
the next time you open your eyes,
notice at how your eye works
peripheral vision,
how we see everything at once,
yet nothing at the same time.
Embrace it. The ambiguity
light is a figure, that holds things,
yet lets the smallest thing slip away.
How the table quivered slightly
and how the bowl held fear against
the white walls
with vermillion shadows.


Darcy was awarded first prize for ”Overcoming grief in the form of birds‘. ‘Think White’ was originally placed second by Fiona during the blind assessment of the entries. However the rules do not permit a poet to win more than one prize.

Darcy Monteath 
Year 10, Logan Park High School

Generously sponsored by

University of Otago

University of Otago: Dept of English & Linquistics

Otago University Press

Otago University Press

Copyright © 2021 · Poems on this Website are owned and copyrighted by the poet / student credited with the particular poem and are subject to New Zealand and international copyright laws · Website by Arts Net