Commended poems 2026
Shinsaku Ashida 'Extinction on the Platform'
Mata Ayoub 'The Last Language'
Fatema Dipita 'Eradicate Them!'
John Gallas 'Encounter with Top Species: The Golden Toad's Sonnet'
Dean Gessie 'Forever Song'
Mary Gilliland 'A Ruse'
Ian Harker 'On the night the Northern Lights go out'
Jayan Eric Holmes 'The Disappearing Sonnet'
Laura Marazita Lotti 'Museum of Small Things'
Leon McRae 'KL 26947'
Basil Meyer 'Uses for the Blade of the Tongue'
Olivia Muir 'ghost of the last mammoth of Wrangel Island'
Laura Webb 'Felis Silvestris'
Elaine Webster 'Owning A Name'
Adam Weitzer 'The Scroll of the Roach'
Stephen Woulds 'What Tulips Never Heard'
Extinction on the Platform by Shinsaku Ashida from Tokyo, Japan
Someone
let go of a hand,
so in the wind a hem is fluttering.
It’s too crowded--
no one knows who pushed,
and even if one child falls,
their name
has already been forgotten.
Though it’s narrow, people run,
and that is how
someone gets pushed out.
There,
even if someone reaches out,
if the faces don’t resemble each other,
the hand is let go.
From the announcement, like a song,
you hear
that children are society’s property,
but when it’s known
to be the child of an insect,
it seems the lyrics are changed.
Clutching, as it fell,
the hem of the insect
that had been stopping floods,
the child of a bird was falling--
and so,
one after another, human children fell.
Every child is holding on
to the hem of someone next to them.
And yet,
the reason hems are swaying
on the platform tonight
is probably
just because
a train
has entered the station
The Last Language by Mata Ayoub from Bracknell, England
We are not ending only forests.
We are ending attention.
The living kind.
The kind that stays
when it would rather leave.
Our words are everywhere
but fewer of them arrive.
We speak in summaries.
We answer before we hear.
We call distance “clarity”.
We call comfort “enough”.
Something in us is thinning.
Not vocabulary
but the courage to mean it.
The planet keeps speaking
in weather, in water, in heat,
and we reply with explanation,
delay dressed as reason.
What is disappearing is not language.
It is the patience for it.
The willingness to stay
until meaning forms
between one breath and another.
But my son turns toward music
as if the body still remembers
what the mouth forgets.
He moves without argument.
He does not perform the right response.
He does not sell his joy as proof.
He simply lives.
And I think:
communication is not the noise we make.
It is the bridge we keep rebuilding
so we do not lose each other
while the world is changing.
“Eradicate them! Eliminate them! Grind them to Extinction!", They bellow their fury chant by Fatema Dipita
The land of our mother, so bountiful and rich in all its splendour, that sustained us for years
Swallowed greedily by the cavernous jaws of a tsunami, a giant toothmark as its calling card
Here we sowed and reaped our own, lived and breathed in our own blood, sweat and tears
Whilst the rest of the world smoked fumes in the ozone, letting wildfires bleed into our backyard
Where do fragments of us end up? Where do we go to rebuild the courage to survive and exist?
When the formidable, haggard shadow of uncertainty stains every hope of starting again, anew
When every memory of sun-soaked laughter, of smoked spices, fall on faces as forgotten mist
Our belongings, farm and animals floats between the froth of wreckage and hope for our crew
“Eradicate them! Eliminate them! Grind them to Extinction!", They bellow their fury chant
In a foreign land where foreign noises filter through the stubborn sieves of her ears
Every new vowel and consonant vies to outcompete the sepia-coloured phonetic phrases
she savoured in her mouth, choreographed with her teeth and stitched into her brain for years
Her tongue twists in a knot when saying “flatbread” instead of “porotha” in front of pitying gazes
She sends her kids to school and overhears her broken speech rattling in her weary voice box
“Ami love you onek, lots of, okay?” she desperately says to her kids as iron-hot scrutiny glows
Years of curbing the rich tapestry of her mother tongue into a tamed beast in smocks and frocks
Reduced a language of dhal and sharis into a silent husk dressed in loud phonics they chose
“Eradicate them! Eliminate them! Grind them to Extinction!", They bellow their fury chant
He thunders through the home of his ancestors, struggling to escape the poachers behind
He tears through the savannah, hearing the ghostly voice of his mother and father urging him on
This Black Rhino feels every stomp of poachers encroaching closer to mutilating his only kind
He is alone, the only one left as every one of his ancestors and family fell. Extinct. Forever gone
And now as he stumbles to the ground, the poachers circling ever closer, they take aim - shoot!
The blood that soaks into the graves of his own before him, mingles with helplessness, defeat
He cradles his horn and looks at it all one last time: the pond that sustained, the tree and its fruit
Knowing him and his kind are extinct. His horn a 5-figure sum that fattens the pockets of cheats
“Eradicate them! Eliminate them! Grind them to Extinction!", They bellow their fury chant
We are caged, we are detained and we are slaughtered until we become a distant memory here
We whose unique features and language threaten the order and law of what has a right to live
and….what does not. We who are shot and buried 10 feet into ignorance for existing in fear
And as they cage us like cattle, we silently pray, that in the afterlife God will graciously forgive
Our sins… if this is the last time we kiss the ground before becoming a part of the sky and stars
We don’t fit in their boxes, we don’t tremble when they kill us, only when they eradicate the kids
Because we watch with tears that bleed into the graves of our own, as torture erupts our scars
Because we aren’t allowed to exist as a kind, our homes and culture burned under their final lid
“Eradicate them! Eliminate them! Grind them to Extinction!", They bellow their fury chant
Glossary:
Porotha: Bangla term for a round, buttery and layered piece of bread, flat and fried in a pan
Ami : Bangla term for I, or Me
Onek : Bangla term for “A lot “
Dhal : A lentil curry
Shari : A south asian garment typically made from cotton or silk worn through elegant draping across the body by women
Encounter with Top Species:
The Golden Toad’s Sonnet by John Gallas from Markfield, England
I slap along the riverbank ... the sun
zips round the emerald beds of watercress,
upon whose sweet, spinachous comfiness
I nap awhile ... rivet. Bullflies run
atwinkle on the creek ... I snooze ... I wake!
The ground goes BOOM BOOM BOOM! The bullflies flee.
Rivet! Something like a trampling tree
comes trampling down the bank - the bogworts shake -
I ask an Eel, ‘Wharrivet ?’ ‘MAN !’ It stands
like Thunder on the shore. A MAN ... We wait
for Wisdom and Enlightenment: our Fate,
old Grandad Puddock says, is in His hands.
It crouches ... (cut) ... and booms back through the trees.
We blink ... The bullflies blow back on the breeze.
forever song by Dean Gessie from Midland, Ontario, Canada
Sunny Rosy May lost her elder sister to tadpole bay
Moonlit May swam deep blue with the pollywog crew
and she was lung heavy and not long for this world
but Sunny Rosy May and no one that day or another
could find Moonlit May for grieving dad and mother
and folks in flippers only turned up tires and zippers
it was then that Sunny Rosy May lost her way
sleeping the livelong day in the dark of her duvet
and calling nightlong for Moonlit May on tadpole bay
anyone from near around could hear the sad sound
of Sunny Rosy May who was quite good with long gone
animal calls and won blue ribbons at fairs and town halls
and she would honk, coo and grunt like the dodo bird
and roar and purr and growl like the sabre tooth tiger
and trumpet, rumble and bark like the woolly mammoth
and all from near around wept to hear dead things no longer
found until Sunny Rosy May took up a moonlit frog from
tadpole bay whose forever song seemed to say, let me go
A RUSE by Mary Gilliland from New York, USA
Seagulls dance
on the ground like raindrops
to bring the earthworms up.
The worms rise, in their blind
unsanctified prayer, to avoid
waterlogged dirt, ignominious
mass drowning. Hooked!
by a scavenger’s serrated beak.
With the insistence of identity
gulls take what they need
to live. The generals knock
on no one’s door. That’s
who they’re pacifying‚ no one.
Mass starvation, cholera.
The occasional food delivery’s
location and when to assemble
is announced. A tank
the villagers believe abandoned
shells the entire queue as
the first bag of flour changes
hands. Or if the tank is dormant
A helicopter.
ON THE NIGHT THE NORTHERN LIGHTS GO OUT by Ian Harker from Leeds
There’s a new rule: everyone must go quietly back to his beginning.
Ken Smith
Burned Books
I try telling Brodie what it was like before,
when the big house was one house,
just one family under one roof but how
can he believe that when all his life
has been stacked up and piled in;
how can I tell him about how it was
before everything came to an end,
how those lights in the sky were the last
of it, how finally the big house wasn’t even
one family but just one man living where forty
live now, rheumy-eyed, hunched over a light
in his room, high walls around the garden--
it wasn’t a park then: there was nothing public
about it. The nights were private dark and the paths
were mantraps, huge jaws that would break your leg
and it would never be re-set. He owned the animals
this man with precious metals on his fingers,
studs of stone at his neck but no son to survive him.
He owned the trees, the rhododendrons and their bent flames.
He went last, him and his time, names filling with moss.
They buried their dogs better than we bury people
and they went bust (Brodie must have understood that at least):
the game was up and only the bridge left arching its back
the way it always did. Here is the steeple, Brodie,
and I show him my hands but he doesn’t get it.
We have lost the photographs of his grandparents
and the sunset and the fossilised trees long since
went for firewood. See all the people sitting in their pews
surrounded by names, surrounded by angels singing in sunlight.
Brodie, you have swung the full length of your body
from blue rope out over the quarry. See all the people
surrounded by bones and broken light sitting
in the bombsites of their homes. See all the people.
But he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand.
The Disappearing Sonnet by Jayan Eric Holmes from London
The elephant in the room
Is that, there is no longer any room
for the elephant, in a shrinking world
after the ravages of mankind.
has removed almost every other living species
and good few of his own, -
(‘I have to say “his” as they mostly are,
empathy not being a quality prominent
in those who are dominant.’)
and no one really cares,
Well not so much as to make enough of a difference.
So pretty soon
we will not be not talking about the thing
that is not there, gone,
from everywhere
except where it isn’t.
And still we’ll not be talking about
the disappearing world and if we are
it’ll just be more hot air.
Which is precisely how we got here in the first place
But then, not for very much longer.
“Hey, I know this does not follow
The usual structure of your traditional sonnet.
But in a world where even you
could soon become extinct
are you really wanting to discuss poetics?”
Museum of Small Things by Laura Marazita Lotti from Porto Alegre,Brazil
In the museum of extinction
there is no noise.
Only labels.
A glass case holds
what was once ordinary:
a frog the color of a warning,
a word no one answers,
a river folded like a map.
The guard says:
“Do not touch.”
As if touch were possible.
Outside, the city continues.
Bread is bought.
Passwords updated.
Extinction does not arrive
with trumpets.
It passes as routine.
First, we stop missing.
Then, we stop noticing.
At night, I imagine the golden toad
looking at us
with the calm
of those who left early.
History will say:
they were informed.
They chose comfort.
And comfort,
as we know,
does not survive.
KL 26947 by Leon McCrae
for Czesława Kwoka
If a roll-call is a number in a room with no clock, then
this, too, is true. A million is to a billion what 11 seconds
is to 31 minutes, and Earth’s labour of 441 minutes is
a tiny fraction for a daughter, one never
unfolding to a loose cough on an erstwhile ulica,
or wetting mama’s crowned eagle in a cattle wagon. Her
silver hairpin needs no shoe; his chert thumb, no left or
right lean. A gasp is already silence, and art sooner
clay than shavings for a bed, or straw for a doll.
To drown Marzanna for the hopes of spring is to speak
of nature. A hardfisted guard, a girl’s lip opening like
a trench; her Peter Pan collar in the furnace, burning
a timeless shadow.
Czesława Kwoka (15 August 1928 – 12 March 1943) was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz.
Uses for the Blade of the Tongue by Basil Meyer from Bracknell, England
I have this to say: Yurok, Sabüm,
Gugu Thaypan, Klallam, Ngasa, Andoa,
Mandan, Caddo, Luhu, Moghol, Apiaka.
It is not a foreign language, but a roll call
of language-ghosts whose names we know.
I am not certain that my tongue killed them,
but it killed some. My mouth
is full of body parts, dead bones
from corpses like these - disarticulated
fossilizing words adrift and swallowed,
cold bones in the stomach of my language.
This thing I love and speak with eats
tongues, dissolves them, leaves only
‘borrowings’ as it avoids the pain
I cannot fathom: the old woman alone
like the last speaker of Wichita
who still hears her mother’s voice in dreams,
but will never hear its songs
from among those about her.
And so I have this to say:
Quapaw, Yahgan, Wukchumni, Mawes,
Aki Cari, Ngandi, Tehuelche, Aka Bo,
Demushbo, Dhangaloo, Aka-Cari, Pazeh
are what death sounds like
as you stand in the silent graveyard
of past tongues.
ghost of the last mammoth of Wrangel Island in conversation with a polar bear, 2025.
By Olivia Muir from St Leonards on Sea, England
by the end I too had fur
of fibreless glass nothing –
generations of auburn bled
from our backs onto the ends
of a Siberian grassland.
our gums were blue
our bones were milk-soft
some of us could not stand
and we wriggled like sea cows under the
sun’s glare.
the island grew smaller, made
cages from our bones
youth became creation –
mythic,
and our eyes
clouded over like pebbles.
I remember lovers without scent,
children snub-nosed,
satine as seals
still bodies forming hollows in the snow
next year, breeding season will
bring fish eggs, mermaid hair
and lungless pups,
washed back out
within a lunar cycle.
1
when they find your bones
the skin-ones will not
touch you – you will hold
too many
bad dreams.
Wrangel Island is a remote island located in the Arctic Ocean between the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea. It is known for being the last stronghold of the woolly mammoth, with mammoth remains dating from 2500-2000 BC, 6000 years after the species went extinct in Eurasia and North America. Due to the island’s geographical isolation, by the time of their estimated extinction, the Wrangel Island mammoths were riddled with genetic mutations from inbreeding. These include fur that was a translucent, satin colour and loss of olfactory glands. Wrangel Island is also known for hosting the most concentrated population of polar bears on Earth. As Arctic Sea ice recedes due to global warming, the territory of polar bears shrinks, posing the same potential threats to the polar bear population in the long term.
Felis silvestris by Laura Webb from Streat, England
A lipogram for a taxidermied Scottish wildcat
Felis tree-sitter
lies still
stiller
irises slit fire-lit
eerie reverie
sleet riffles silver
it stirs
velvet feet flitter
little ifrit
if settlers’ steel fists
fell trees
levee rivers
it flees
ferries its litter
ever restless
free
resettles
resists
till rifles
sever velvet
it reels
treeless
fevers stir
life’s veil lifts
it rises
sees itself
Felis still-life
Owning a name by Elaine Webster from Dalkeith, Scotland
They demanded the Books,
intending to burn them,
kettled key ballads
to smother in shadows.
The youngest of mothers
lies smeared in her trauma,
red head tilting backwards
lungs exhaling the shame.
Babe warmly wriggling
tickling mum’s breathing,
exploring mum’s lips
finds dangerous phonemes
Tickled by fricatives
and saliva-wet plosives,
dark eyes giggling-playful,
body soaking up words.
Mum pulls her much closer
to whisper her naming
ancient, traditional,
three power-laden words
spoken softly in colours,
steeped long in dream-stories
of bold hunters’ feasting
on rallying speeches.
Baby mirrors the rhythm,
tongue tasting the magic
latching on to mum’s magic,
a banned language, a name.
The Scroll of the Roach by Adam Weitzer from Melbourne, Australia
Restless in the true night, I see what the day keeps far:
There is a cockroach in my head. In my head
Gregor Samsa, ungeheures Ungeziefer, (1)
Awakening as from another troubled
Dream, rampant on hind legs, thorax
Flared proudly against my bed, squeals to me
As if in his Habsburg shim he
Saw it close: the black political
Gut, white hot in heat of ghrelin reach--
Reach as long intestines reach, and reach, and now reach
The mouth of our century; and raise its flag in the digital dust,
Infinite
Blank of pixels; screen alight as a midnight
Massage; gone from mind as clothes from Hiroshima. Then:
Scroll of a numb thumb—stoop of a tight neck
The trapdoor
Opens--
The snapped necks of worlds spray like tumbleweed; a regime felled
A regimen stalled in the minuted hour. And scrape
Of roach antenna like a television I am no longer
The crowning, clowning Edifice of Eden;
I am the serpent
That consigns me to run myself through
The spin of a click-pulsed washer because yes
Moses split the sea
For me
To run the gauntlet,
Smacked into want of the sunken island
Where in muteness no mereness of being soils; till
In a great wailing exodus of cockroach the trapdoor
Shuts; the screen is dropped.
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ, נוֹתֵן הַתּוֹרָה : I raise the scroll of a feeling hand (2)
1 ‘Monstrous cockroach’. From Franz Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’ in Metamorphosis & Other Stories, trans. Michael Hofmann (Penguin Books, 2007), 87. The full opening line reads: ‘When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.’
2 Hebrew for ‘Notein HaTorah’—‘Blessed are you, God, the Giver of the Torah’—recited prior to reading from the Torah.
What Tulips Never Heard. by Stephen Woulds from Leeds
A long pause in the terminal line --
the queues of those who chose to stay behind:
wait in
waiting
for weightlessness.
An insect slips in fractured loops, zigzags,
snagged mid-flight in the airport’s breeze, pushed
from a line in the season’s geometry.
A boy throws his arms to catch its fall, toes
on the edge of the no-go zone, where gravity
answered his question: the global scale of it all.
A queue clustered tight around his hands, reading
the compass-tilt in his palms, this tiny life, emptied,
and ticked off names fallen like species lists.
His two lips spoke: an antique honey-machine,
a bee-dot
was-dot
a still-might-be-dot.
When Short-haired bumbles fell beside the flowerpots.
The boy said seeds can fix all things and dug a grave
in his pocket — a precaution. The ship ascends
as scheduled, its tarmac shadow insect-thin.
