Winners 2011: Commended:Molly_Underwood
MOLLY UNDERWOOD
The Perse Upper School, Cambridge
The Breaking Day

We see only sunblood, we are born –
Shudderspat from foetal sleep
Into the cold and neon dawn.

Clumsy-thumbs and edges, we are small,
But snatching at our wish-warm sheets
We could be anything at all:

Blazing and unlovely, blind no more
And not yet blind, the things we know
Are few and true and wordless raw.

Later, not much later, we will fall:
We’ll taste the orange segment day,
Splintered, sixty, twenty-four –

Anchorless and answerless we’ll claw
At shrinking, bread-in-water sky
That can’t contain us anymore,

But momentless and now-ful, not at war,
We do not hate the morning world
That made us sunshine-sick and sore.