TCA's National Poetry Day winner
Year 13 student Max Hamilton, from Thomas Clarkson Academy was chosen as this year’s winner of TCA’s National Poetry Day competition thanks to his evocative verse.
The theme this year was Vision and Max chose to write about nature:
Visions of Nature Blinded, you turn your eyes from me. I see You speak of the future: what do you see? I loved you once, caring for your safety, What do I see? My demise, my last breath. I remember your youth, the days of old. |
He was awarded a signed copy of Chris Riddell’s Poems to Fall in Love With and an Amazon gift voucher.
Describing his poem, Max said: 'It's about Mother Nature comprehending the betrayal of humankind due to global warming and chaos. Lockdown gave us the opportunity to get back out into nature and explore the world around us. I think we have become so focussed on office settings that we don’t respect nature as much as we should, or see what we are doing to it.'
Max is hoping to have his anthology of poetry, In the Sun’s Shadow, published next year.
He enjoys the poetry of Oscar Wilde and says his dream job would be archiving and translating the work of Sappho, a lyric poet of ancient Greece.