Year 13 Winning Poem
Bang
a girl is given a gun.
life.
blossoms in her gut, roses in her lungs – you can breathe again.
a girl is a gun.
death.
thorns in her heart, ivy wrapped around her bones – you are free at last.
a gun is a girl.
warm, gun-metal grey, honey on her tongue touch – you lost.
a girl is given a gun is given life is death is a gun is a girl.
now shoot.
By Rosie Kent, Year 13
Comment by Daljit Nagra:
“Bang is a wonderfully discontinuous poem that swivels its tense drama through fractured narrative, a series of organic images and willed metaphors that aim to shock. The disrupted grammar and broken logic intensify the threat of a girl about to shoot a gun or become explosive as the impact of a shot gun. Terrifying yet superbly playful.”