Nicola Poulton

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Nicola Poulton

Top 100 Poets of the Year Award 2005
3rd Place Prize Winner of £500

I’m 18 years old and I’ve just taken my A-Levels in drama, English literature and history. I’m hoping to go to university later this year to study drama and creative writing.

I love music and reading, as well as writing, and I’m interested in world affairs. Poetry allows me to express my opinions and make a point about what’s going on in the world. That was what I was trying to do with ‘A Girl With Red Hair’ and I hope I achieved it. I was shocked when I received the letter telling me I was one of the Top 100 Poets of the Year. I hope to be a writer some day, hopefully this is just the first step for me, so thanks a lot!

This is Nicola’s £500 winning poem A Girl With Red Hair:

A Girl With Red Hair

At eight, boys
Play games, tease girls, play war.
At eighteen, boys
Play football, chase girls,
Go to war.
At eighteen, death grips my hand with pale, clammy fingers
Teeth chatter, but it’s the cold,
Not pain and not fear.
Soldiers don’t know fear,
Not even if they’re only eighteen.
There’s blood.
On my palms, knees, saturating the ground.
Life on the inside,
Death on the outside.
Here, I’ve seen every way a human can live,
And every way a human can die.
But death has no name,
At least none that I know of.
But death has an age,
Eighteen.
Like me.
And I see, in frightened green eyes,
A girl with red hair, brown eyes
And a nose that wrinkles when she smiles.
I see a kiss both tender and passionate.
Forever. Never. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
I watch death play out his life in an imaginary kiss,
But it was always going to be goodbye.
Because a boy died in my arms.
Nameless,
And only eighteen.

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