Author: Zara Meadows
Age: 18
School: Belfast Royal Academy, Belfast, Co Antrim
Growth
These words have ripened – I am aware
of their bursting around the edges, their distinguished
outpouring of sweetness, polite assassinations
jouking round the juiced-up corners
of my imagination, apologetically
wrathful. Coming to write at all is coming to
sink your knuckles deep into rot, to
leave your stains behind in the blank spaces between stanzas,
to thumb out the letters that will fill them in.
It is to heave lungfuls of language and feel your breath
blow open a thousand dictionaries, spit marks
on footnotes, sticky prints on page numbers, to clutch
a question mark in your fist like a sword
in a stone. Tomorrow
I think I will dance in a full-stop field,
tongue a phantom protagonist, get wine-drunk
on a satisfying denouement. But now
it is helpful to know your way around
the black opening of a tonsilled alley, out of which
a million guttural hacks are phlegmed every day – it will be these
that first define you. They will knot your eloquence
like a clumsy Boy Scout, hang you gagged
and yearning for a sentence. If your opened wounds
are not peppered with salt once you’ve
saved the word document, all of it was nothing
but a few etchings of inky software, the clot-gluey dregs
of a knife-scraped jam jar.
You are responsible for this clarity, this
opening of yourself for leisurely auction – write only
on what the world will surely understand. In the tradition
of a thousand poets before me, this was about
blackberries – but you had to know
at least one deep metaphor about small fruit to really
‘get it’.
