Now Open
Closing date : Sunday 14th August, 2022
Ballina Region for Refugees Poetry Prize 2022
in memory of Louise Griffiths – a past member of BR4R
Proudly supported by
The 2022 BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize
A Turning Point
Proudly supported by the journal Social Alternatives
The BR4R 2021 Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize is now open
Closing date: Sunday 14th August 2022
Ballina Region for Refugees (BR4R) invites you to submit up to three poems to this year’s Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize.
The BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize celebrates the positive contributions that refugees make to our communities. It acknowledges the circumstances that forced them to flee their homelands and request refuge in Australia.
This year’s Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize theme is ‘A Turning Point’.
We welcome poems, from anyone in the community, that consider the experiences, aspirations and hopes of refugees and asylum seekers who are seeking a home in which they can build new, meaningful and safe lives. Poems from refugees and asylum seekers themselves are especially welcome.
The 2022 BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize celebrates refugees and asylum seekers reaching significant turning points in their lives. The Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize acknowledges that refugees and asylum seekers have encountered important turning points throughout their journeys to safety, from the moment they decided to flee their home, through the many turning points they navigate during their journey across a dangerous world, until the time they become established in their new country, community and home. The Poetry Prize especially celebrates the point at which refugees and asylum seekers can settle in a new community and renew their lives after years of uncertainty.
You are invited to send in up to three poems of up to 50 lines each.
Entry is free and is open to anyone living in Australia.
BR4R especially welcomes poems from refugees and those seeking asylum in Australia.
The poems will be judged by poet Juan Garrido-Salgado.
Juan is a poet, translator and human rights activist. He immigrated to Australia from Chile in 1990, fleeing the regime that burned his poetry and imprisoned and tortured him for his political activism. He has published eight books of poetry, and his poems have been widely translated.
Cash prizes will be awarded to first, second, and third place winners.
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- First-place prize is $300,
- Second-place prize is $150
- Third-place prize is $50.
Winning entries and selected runners-up will be published on the BR4R web site and in Social Alternatives, a print journal that analyses, critiques and reviews social issues and problems, and seeks to generate insight, knowledge, and understanding of our world. The journal is committed to social justice and stimulating social alternatives to current conditions. You can find more about the journal at Social Alternatives.
The Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize was established in 2019
in memory of Louise Griffiths, a past member of BR4R.
Winner 2021
home is a poem
by Scott-Patrick Mitchell
bombshell
destroys our poem
dust in suitcase
of what was
the journey away from
here, sky
doesn’t whistle
with erasure
& serenade of shell
instead, wind pollinated
with dishes, bring memory
of land to the tongue
stove, a mouth:
dictionary of spices
combine old words
into new world
learn brick & mortar
remake language & syntax
reshape this place
write stanzas
with three grammars:
voice of mother
voice of father
voice of here & now
how a house is the poem
stuck inside our head
but a home is the poem
we write instead
Runners Up 2021
2nd place
sailor
by Colin Montfort
the waiting room is cramped with expectations
moiling
on the blind side
homeric welcome home charades
kool-aid toasts and truckled cheer
from those who don’t remember
somewhere else the sailor
who comes and goes the way of least resistance
dillies here
and dallies there
like rumour
the keenest player bitten twice
untwisting fate’s capricious catch
is back inside
half asleep in yellow fog
no witness in the wash
to mind the cruel mirage
seething in his soul
but time
the sailor’s sometime friend
most trusted
and or feared
when ticking
every day the tide will toggle
twice each way behind his back
sweeping odds against the clock
to spent from pending paradox
it’s twilight shift and sister ruth
resets the locks
the rubber rooms are keyless now
the yellow door says ward thirteen
behind it in a parallel hallucination
shadow beings twiddle fog
ships pass
almost scuffing
barely felt
sailor dreaming snuffles and sighs
levitates on a laudanum wave
the quiver of a tell-tale thread
a salty breeze
and some forever sail away
anchor here and there when things need fixing
the high seas howl and whisper
sometimes at eventide
you can hear from here to nowhere gently ticking
..ooOoo..
3rd place
How do they rest
by Adele Aria
She pushes against the small birdcage
he cannot bear to unlock
The dog barks and whimpers
responding to resistance and rage
Her world shrunken and deflated by love
that he labels with shame
She does not go easy
hopes only seen through water above
He takes her future and deletes her past
to remake her as gone
Who and what can she be
when his story is what we hear last
..ooOoo..
Best Poem by a poet identifying as a refugee or asylum seeker
My Pain Cannot Be Traded
by Arad Nik
Here colour and race fight together
Like boat people fight with politics
The yellow sun in the flag stamps the red earth with a black struggle
And sets over Nauru where into the black night our hopes crumble
Detention is just another word for jail
The tears of a stolen generation cannot fail
Aboriginal history is a bloody book
Offshore you will find another one — if you look
My talking with aboriginal was beautiful and sweet
The boat is witness for where our stories meet
Between sky and ocean lies the only path for the refugees feet
Welcome said aboriginal and opened a door to me
A man from a different minority
I could read his story in the face behind the smile he gave me
I could read his story in the face behind the smile he showed me
His eyes became a mirror of peace rippling beneath the shadow of pain
His heart revealed my vision of paradise
His pain is my pain
How can I treat it?
His sad sound
How can I explain it?
All the stars in the sky tell his stories and reflect his love for this place
In this light Australia makes sense
Respect the sun in his flag
This was my first lesson
I am full of pain
Full of suffering
Full of torture
The dots painted on his face dance my pain
Don’t doubt
the world is beautiful
You can see it
enjoy it
But why in all this beautiful world
Can’t they give a space for me
You want to know more about my pain
Sit and listen
For my pain there is no cure
It is the same pain as his pain
Do you listen to him?
Do you hear him?
Winner 2020
Can I Hold a Village?
by Victoria King
Can one person hold a village? Bear the message of lineage?
Can one person hold a people, a country, a faith, a race,
A way of seeing, of being?
A legacy?
Is this me?
Could I be that container, floating on waters
Captured and caught and still holding that message,
As a mother to my daughter?
That message whose nuance is so rich and so deep, so pungently technicolour-sweet
And then agonisingly elusive and fleet
But there, like a handprint
Indescribably perfect.
For yes, that message lies in me, swells through me
In the deep, blood-heavy thud in me,
Swelling and abating, flood-like
Washing, enveloping, leaving me wanting
Gasping, for I am unable not to hold this message
And tend it, and send it
In the milk of my breast
With the heft of my chest
Along the glide of my breath
Through the slick of my sweat
Imbued in my smiles, my tears, my cries, denials
My lullabies to my child.
Can one person whisper the wilds
Of the shushing trees that push and ease
The bulge of their girth through rock-layered earth?
Can they breathe the plumes of blue sky crags and silver streams,
Of smoke curls leaving evening fires?
Can one person perspire
The honey-rich sweetness of dates hanging uneaten?
Or hum the buzzing burr of flies
Snatching at dust-filled eyes
That are deep and brimming with love.
Am I enough?
My mother held all this in me
For me
As did her mother, and her mother, and her mother
… And so on forever.
Our heredity, our legacy.
But now, how can I find a way?
A castaway, no longer there
Encumbered, deracinated, gasping for air
Grasping
For the clutch of home, for the certainty of knowing.
I am suffocating, alienated, carved in two by the currents that rage in me,
Claw at me.
And yet their power enables me.
And so determinedly, I make my plea:
My child, let me try.
Runners Up 2020
2nd place
Disappeared
by Genevieve Barr
Day breaks, out of tune,
and morning finds its way, half-heartedly
to its well worn pedestal.
Stale air, and the sheets are stained again
with the boredom of insistence of existence.
A howling routine.
A calendar is checked,
(always full of hope that it will tell me something more).
Is it yesterday? Tomorrow? Or today?
I position myself, straight backed upon the waiting room chair
and waste away the beginning of another, other day.
There’s a lethargy in here.
Harsh words scrape at the door.
An afternoon hides behind household chores.
I have seen the undead blinking,
as I sit giggling at the in joke
written long ago today.
What’s it like to have never been?
To turn a corner, never seen. To turn another…
Where was I? And now I’m not.
What’s it like to be in between?
A time…a place…..My defining moment.
What’s it like to have disappeared?
Or worse; thrown out with the trash
and pissed on by the cat.
What’s it like to have disappeared?
An empty space.
A weeping sore.
A crashing bore.
A deaf ear turned.
A history burned.
A future scorned.
A lethargy born.
What’s it like to be in between?
Is it like a tiresome day? Is it like a routine way?
And not soon enough, evening arrives
and extinguishes any hope of an unexpected tomorrow.
..ooOoo..
3rd place
Empty Envelope
by Yasaman Bagheri
Falling off the sinking boat
With our hands held against the waves,
We kept the pattern to rescue
Every second’s worth and stretched to a lifetime.
Inside the cloud of spilled gasoline and blood
When hope was sinking down
Hands reached to rescue.
Our disappeared boat was given a name,
(U)nifrom (L)ima (A)lpha.
As if water had washed our names away;
Instead, numbers had appeared
From one to a hundred and two.
We were (re)named and handed an envelope –
A message of hope.
Time worked differently in there:
We watched it, counted it;
They got paid for it;
We suffered it, lost it;
Inside the reports never read.
We were kids born between policies.
The Border Force man spoke to us of laws.
Laws denied us, detained us.
Laws always designed against us.
When he sent out his men and
they had our throats in their hands,
I thought about how
‘Boat’ came before ‘People’
And ‘Border’ before ‘Force’.
This was the message of hope:
We opened it, an empty envelope,
Full of unwritten words:
‘We will make sure
You will never have a home.’
Every year we are less human
More popular election-winning lies.
You can rise from the ocean
With blood-coloured wings
Sharks will let you pass – unharmed.
But you will drown in prison camps.
Close your eyes this time,
Let me build you a boat
From my two hands,
A boat that will set you free
From these prison camps.
You will sail to no ‘Shore’ ‘Off’ of our hearts;
The road you’ll travel from seeking refuge to finding home,
Will not end behind a maximum-security fence;
Home will not be a place in the palm of your hands
Where you hold the tally mark of years –
(Un)lived in prison camps.
..ooOoo..
ABN 64 683380 227
