Growth

Author: Zara Meadows
Age: 18
School: Belfast Royal Academy, Belfast, Co Antrim

Growth

These words have ripened – I am aware

of their bursting around the edges, their distinguished

The Wizard’s Quest

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‘The never-ending question: Are you a boy or a girl?’

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‘I’m 16 years old, raised on the Barn of the Crumlin Road’

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outpouring of sweetness, polite assassinations

jouking round the juiced-up corners

of my imagination, apologetically

wrathful. Coming to write at all is coming to

sink your knuckles deep into rot, to

leave your stains behind in the blank spaces between stanzas,

to thumb out the letters that will fill them in.

It is to heave lungfuls of language and feel your breath

blow open a thousand dictionaries, spit marks

on footnotes, sticky prints on page numbers, to clutch

a question mark in your fist like a sword

in a stone. Tomorrow

I think I will dance in a full-stop field,

tongue a phantom protagonist, get wine-drunk

on a satisfying denouement. But now

it is helpful to know your way around

the black opening of a tonsilled alley, out of which

a million guttural hacks are phlegmed every day – it will be these

that first define you. They will knot your eloquence

like a clumsy Boy Scout, hang you gagged

and yearning for a sentence. If your opened wounds

are not peppered with salt once you’ve

saved the word document, all of it was nothing

but a few etchings of inky software, the clot-gluey dregs

of a knife-scraped jam jar.

You are responsible for this clarity, this

opening of yourself for leisurely auction – write only

on what the world will surely understand. In the tradition

of a thousand poets before me, this was about

blackberries – but you had to know

at least one deep metaphor about small fruit to really

‘get it’.