Congratulations to Tunmise Adebowale for her recent win at the 2023 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook Student Poetry Competition. Tunmise won the Year 13 prize for her poem titled 'A Little Grace'.

A Little Grace

I hail from Nigeria’s southwest Ile-Ife, where
the Dwarf lambs stare out at the
mountainsides for hours.

The heat like a razor,
with no wool to pool for spending.

The farm is a tired place some mornings.
Moves slow like honey.

When Grandpa tells stories of his older brother’s death,
sickness spreading like sunlight,
I think of those sheep in the yard.

I wonder if a man from my family
could be gentle enough.

A generation of work-hurt hands
bending to touch the softness of
the bottom of the basin.

A touch like a pull,
like a yearn for a cure,
like reaching out for
your mother in a dream.

If he stuck his hand out in the middle of the night
doused with sick and sweat, would the youngest of the flock
crane its neck from its place in
the pasture and send him off running?

Someplace where boys never die
before their mothers and mornings are
best spent holding wives by their waist,
dying slow deaths,
juicing life with our teeth
at the breakfast table.

Tunmise Adebowale
Year 13

The link to the results is here: https://www.masseypress.ac.nz/news/2023/august/announcing-the-winning-poems-of-the-2023-poetry-aotearoa-yearbook-student-poetry-competition/

Helen Badcock - Arts Coordinator