Congratulations for the win Ellen Vigus and thank you so much for recognising the challenge and very real threat that bushfire poses to so much of our great country. And thank you to our friends at the Stirling Times for sharing Ellen’s great news and wonderful work in the article below.
Warwick resident Ellen Vigus has won the senior category of the Golden Pen Award 2020. Photo: Stirling Times
SEEING the country in flames earlier this year has prompted a budding poet to branch out and enter a writing competition.
Churchlands Senior High School Year 12 student Ellen Vigus won the senior category, age 15-17, of the Golden Pen Award 2020.
She joined participants from around WA in sending their fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, comic and graphic novel around the theme of ‘Planet Earth’.
Ellen said the idea for her winning poem The World Rewound was born during the bushfires burning in Australia earlier this year.
“Everything was sort of reversed back to the start and it has such an impact on the earth,” she said.
“I have been stewing on the idea for a few days but I fleshed it out in my mind and I sat down and wrote it in one afternoon.”
The Warwick resident said this was the first time she had entered the Golden Pen Writing Award.
“Earlier this year, I decided I want to get a bit more serious about my writing and putting my work out there a bit more,” she said.
“I usually write about the people around me, topics that I‘m thinking about and things to do about mental health.
“I haven’t really tackled an issue that sort of big and more of a global issue before. “
Ellen won $500 and a $100 voucher to Boffins Books as the winner of the senior category.
The World Rewound
by Ellen Vigus
i fall asleep / and in my dream / we are all
walking backwards / towards a forgotten
beginning / the earth inhales darkness / and
exhales light / the shore crashes against
the ocean / and time spins in reverse / we
watch the axe yield / to a regrown forest /
extinction is swallowed / by the rebirth of
creatures long vanished / broken fissures
fuse and smooth over/ the wounded earth
knits together / leaving no scar / graveyards
give birth to a second chance / smoke is
sucked back into stuttering fires / plastic
islands break apart / and life is poured back
into the ocean / ice caps crystallise / the
dusty sky clears / and the earth remembers
her youth / those days when we treated her
like home / those days before she stopped
forgiving us / for apologies we never offered
/ in my dream / the world is rewound / and
we start afresh /
but i wake up / and we are all marching
forwards / into a burning future
https://www.perthnow.com.au/community-news/stirling-times/warwick-teenager-wins-award-with-poem-inspired-by-australian-bushfires-c-1104674
