HRO Poet Laureate
A Year 11 girl has been announced as Headington Rye Oxford’s next Poet Laureate.
Octavia’s poem, ‘Improved gravitational theory’, was selected by the English Department as the winning poem from a large number of impressive submissions.
English teacher Dr Cassie Westwood said: “This is a poem simultaneously delicate and well-built, intimate and expansive. It does a wonderful job of connecting the personal with the cosmological, and in doing so manages to speak with an individual voice about universal feelings – while always being careful not to fall into cliché.
“Given these shifts in scale, it’s also important that those shifts are handled deftly – which they are; we particularly like the move from the impersonal stars ‘Peering down’ at the ‘little clusters of people’ to the punning assertion that ‘We’ (those people) ‘aren’t fully appreciating the gravity / Of this’. The line has something of the cinematic quality of the opening of It’s a Wonderful Life.
“Octavia’s poem is a worthy winner from a competitive field of submissions. Thanks to all who were brave enough to put themselves forward and huge congratulations to our new Headington Rye Poet Laureate, Octavia!
“Her first official engagement as Laureate will be as a judge for the Lower Fourth’s Poetry By Heart competition, this Friday. Stay tuned for more!”
Improved gravitational theory
So we laugh,
for two quarters of a turn,
The Earth, as usual, spins,
And you would’ve thought we could feel it from the way we stumble
With tears down our faces, dizzier than I’ve ever felt.
The light fading
Into dusk, as The Earth turns to face her silver coin of an
anchor. The moon, our moon, pulling free from us
at 3.78cm every year. It haunts me, I want to take the longest needle I can
find and stitch her back into the darkness,
With that little cluster of stars like a fading stain of light. Pricks of silver
Peering down at our smiling little cluster of people.
We aren’t fully appreciating the gravity
Of this, how we all pull together like terrified black holes,
grasping all that matter, to us,
All that matters is strung by our hands into ribbons with fear or care.
Today we reside in this tear in the dark canvas of uncertainty.
Anyway, for you I would push it myself, bare hands to crater, 3.78cm every year.
You’re proof, to me, of something bigger than the vast silence.
By Octavia, U5AP
