Haberdashers’ Crayford Academy Year 13 student, Taylor, beat countless other hopefuls to be one of the winners of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2025 award.
More than 10,000 poets aged 11-17 submitted over 28,300 poems into the 2025 competition. Young people from 135 countries took part from as far afield as Uzbekistan, Fiji, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, as well as the four corners of the UK. The winners were chosen by judges Colette Bryce and Will Harris.
And sometimes it is a queue, and sometimes
it is a concert crowd, and sometimes it
is an empty room with a mirror. I mean it, full body;
their skin is like mirror and the worst part
about that is really you can see yourself in it
and acknowledge forcibly what you are becoming. Frankenstein.
All you are is a vessel for ironic secret hatred
continuously begging to be dressed up. I
never said if it was self, but they are all
selves.
Orange halves near identical. And all you are
is a line of code for a price comparison website.
Here we go; this one is shorter than me, short.
This one is stranger than me, but in the way that gets you followed holy and not in the way that gets you followed home. This one
knows how to talk and not
throw words like a synthesizing machine learning
that it exists. This one
looks like she went to the butchers and asked the man,
her man my man everybody’s answering to a man,
she asked him to take the prime
cuts of meat on her cheeks, arms, thighs,
and the sacred stomach where the fruit should
be kept. (She looked at herself in the cleaver before she batted her eyes
and struck the ball out.)
There are so many tiny parts of me that I want
to saw off with a prayer, steal from other girls and sew onto myself, klepto stitched gossip train. Our jealousy paves a road for taboo tyranny of patriarchal glory, I say to
no-one at all in this room, but I see
the brown-haired girls in a line. I see them
