RGS
POET OF THE YEAR 2025
This is the fifth year of the RGS Poet of the Year competition. Students were encouraged to write a poem in response to the theme of ‘love’ and drew inspiration from a section of the Rupert Brooke poem ‘The Great Lover’.
The judge’s job was extremely difficult. Guest judge, Graham, a former RGS student, commented on the quality and originality of the poems.
Love comes in many forms. These poems explore the people, the places and the moments in life that touch our hearts in so many ways.
This anthology is a celebration of the talent here at RGS and will serve as inspiration for future Poets of the Year.
Sam Gasson, Teacher of English
Lower School
The Best Kind of Love by Alice P (Lower School Winner)
You show your love for your pets, friends and family,
And you declare your love for your books on sci-fi or fantasy,
But have you got to know yourself, mentally and emotionally?
Have you got to know that you should treat yourself affectionately?
For truly loving others only comes when self-love is in motion.
Appreciating your talents creates positive emotion,
Stay true to yourself even if that means disappointing another,
Never seek approval, don't let yourself suffer,
Reward yourself with a heated weighted blanket,
Or recognise your efforts with a restaurant banquet.
Just simply respect yourself for who you are,
And learn to know that you truly are a star.
My message is for you, today,
To never hate yourself or care what others say.
You are you, and you are amazing,
And everyone needs to have self-love,
So you start trailblazing!
Things I love about the world by Freya B
The smell of wet, freshly mown grass; The crunch of cracked glass;
The autumn leaves falling in the breeze; The sound of an atomic sneeze;
The chill of cold fingers thawing by the fire;
The crack of lightning zipping down like a wire; The pitter of rain on the window sill; The old fashioned ring of the bell on a till;
The aroma of newly delicious baked bread; The buzz of a bee in a flower bed;
The tingle of the rain on a hot summer’s day;
The golden light of the setting sun’s ray; The tick of a hard ball on a cricket bat; The mysterious smile of a devilish cat; Isn’t this world a wonderful place? Our world is truly ace!
So let’s look after it, Everything we can, bit by bit.
Things I love by Emily W
I love it when I read my book
The comfy couch
The story hook.
I love it when I'm in the shops
All the fun
It never stops.
I love it when I’m in the sea
Jumping waves
It gives me glee.
I love it when I'm here at home
Where love surrounds
I freely roam.
I love it when the day is done
With dreams to chase
And laughter spun.
A Day Out by Bella L
Hot soup and bread in the golden afternoon, Chatting happy, like a red balloon
We sit and laugh till both our sides ache, Spilling food everywhere, leaving trails of cake.
The screen glows dimly: the battle won, A Bedwars match, always fun.
We shout in triumph, grinning ear to ear, "We did it!" throwing down our yellow gear.
Later we sing, well, at least try,
Then fall back in laughter again, a joyful cry
Our voices not perfect, but still on beat, Chanting and supporting our favourite athlete.
Then we're walking through floral flower fields,
Wondering what the blackberry bushes yield.
We walk through flowers, blue, pink and orange,
Having a day of fun with no challenges!
Love by Esme R
What is love?
Love is a blanket. Its deep embrace warms you to your heart, And wraps you up in a bubble of peace. It never fades and blazes from the start, And fits you like an old, comfy fleece.
Love is a flower. A bud of joy is sown inside, And blooms as time goes by. When watered, it will sprout and thrive. But alone, it will wither and die.
Love is music. It surrounds you in soft sounds so sweet, Harmonies, pure and clear, All instruments together following the beat, Each voice so stunning to hear.
Love is the ocean.
There are crashing waves and roaring seas,
But the tide changes always.
Then once again there's the calming breeze,
And laughter fills the bays.
That is love.
Love By Lucy M
When I wake up in the morning I look for things I love.
The gorgeous pastel sunrise resting in the sky above.
The click of a bottle lid closing;
The gentle hum of a printer,
The thrilling satisfaction of removing a splinter.
The serene feeling of a quiet space, Or being snuggled up in my quiet space,
My absolute favourite place.
The dreamy feeling of reading in the warm, And watching outside as a storm starts to form.
These are times that put a smile on your face,
Though you can't really explain why.
A unique kind of happiness –
One that you could never buy.
Welcome Home by Sophia Y
I love being picked off the shelf.
My pages get flipped, my paper crinkled, And the story inside me stirs.
A girl in a storm, a wolf on a mountain,
A boy rowing across the sea.
Ink and paper, breath and bone,
I rest until I'm not alone.
The creak of my spine, the smell of the pine, Settled under dust and time.
A place for every mind that roams,
My page is open – welcome home.
These I have loved by Ruby SW
Bright shining stars, vivid skylights
Endless skies and pitch-black midnights
Infinite haunting spooky dreams,
Rustles & whispers, stirred dead leaves
The rustle of pages as books are read,
Delightful thoughts in my head
Silence, peace and freshly fallen leaves
Droplets of water, freshly mown grass
Dozens of smiles and bundles of laughs
The roar of a car, as it speeds by,
The beautiful moon high in the sky
Tufts of grass, soft as a throw
Spots of moss, like a pillow
Eternal darkness, infinite light
The stars in the sky, ever so bright
Cupid by Elena P
Who is he but the angelic baby in the sky?
Or, the overhyped match maker drawn to young lovers?
Maybe just a simple baby with a bow and arrow?
Possibly just a figment of a love lost person's imagination?
My opinion - he is just an attention seeker, Drawn to affection like a moth to a flame, But who's covered in hearts and flies oh so high, I suppose he might not be at fault for his brat-like behaviour.
Those who adore him should also take the fall.
Starstruck lovers calling out to the loved baby?
It's a recipe for being spoiled I say.
Cupid has his holiday, he has his fan army.
What else could he want?
Love, that's what.
You might think it's crazy, but he's just a baby
Who has given you love and never got any back.
Only fake love like worthless plastic toys, Loved for a day then thrown away.
So, this ends my opinion of Cupid so dear,
Just give him some love and all shall end well.
These I have loved… by Freya L
Vibrant colours, azure blues, Pastel pinks and pale hues,
Reading Greek Myths and turning the page, From heart-breaking stories to Zeus in a rage.
Murder mystery, fiction too, There’s always a book just right for you!
The sound of laughter, happiness, cheer, Everything’s joyous when loved ones are near.
Curled up cats, and soft, silky fur,
The bright green eyes and the sound of the purr.
A delicate rose; it tilts its head,
The sweet-smelling scent, and the petals bright red.
Maybe I’ll be singing, quiet or loud, Or maybe playing the oboe, making my parents proud.
All the things I love, that are special in each way, Are the things that make me smile, and make the sadness go away.
These I Have Loved By Ottilie L
Snuggling my little dog, so loving and warm; Muddy footballs smashing the back of the net; My grandma’s hugs – soft and safe, her colourful earrings, and Her staying the night; Catchy music on the radio; Relaxing in front of the telly; Singing loud when nobody’s listening; Dancing free when nobody’s watching; Rare rainbow ribbons colouring the sky; Mustard, runny eggs, Chinese food, chocolate muffins, fluffy Pancakes, and chewy toast;
Cosy, fleecy pyjamas warming on our trusty red Aga; The glittering, endless sea, like a sheet of glass – calm and blue, deep
Beneath the smiling sun;
Forever friends who make me happy, and busy days at school; Drawing and painting the pictures in my head, bringing them to life; A lazy day on my pebbly beach, watching the world go by; Performing on the stage; Fun-filled, happy days; Soaking in a warm, soothing bath in the early evening; The sweet smell of our garden apples simmering; Jumping into a cold, clear swimming pool on a boiling hot day; TV programmes that make me laugh; Being a hedgehog curled around my favourite book; Listening to the rain tapping on my caravan roof; The crash of angry waves on a wild, windy day; My family, caring and loving, always there for me; Decorating the Christmas tree; Nestling under my duvet when it’s time to go to bed.
These I have loved, And I always will…
Upper School
End of Friday by Freddie E
The clock drifts past its duties, and something inside me unclenches. The week folds itself away, pages turned, ink still drying.
Outside, the air feels unplanned, alive in a quieter way. I walk slower, taste time again, remember what breathing without purpose feels like.
There’s no rush now, only space, and the soft promise that tomorrow doesn’t need a reason.
Burnt Toast by Sophie L
Sometimes I look at you and think you belong in a fairytale not the sad ones, not tragedies, but where lampposts glow a little warmer when you walk beneath them. Because with you, even the rain looks like a movie scene. Sometimes I dream you’d take my hand And run through streets filled with auburn. Come. Wait below my balcony To escape from reality. Hands in your pockets, Raindrops collecting on your eyelashes Details only I would notice. Sometimes I think of mornings, Just you and me in pyjamas, half asleep.
Burnt toast, lukewarm tea, old CDs: Dancing around the living room, Twirling in the hopeful glow of twilight. Simple, normal, ordinary:
Love. Sometimes I wonder about secret Escapes from society by candlelight. If you would wait for me
After the clock strikes midnight.
Climb the turrets of the castle I’m trapped in Run. Find me, kiss me,
Wake me from my dream.
Sometimes I hope you’ll be here
Year after year.
Take away the bitterness of winter
Replace it with coziness.
Fairy lights intertwining with mistletoe and ivy
And my favourite gift would be… You.
Sometimes I look at you and think —
It’s because of you I find joy in all these things
The fantasy you bring me
The love, the magic, that rush of heat; But you’ve also taught me how to love
All things ordinary,
Even your burnt toast.
paint by Anya W (Upper School Winner)
Van Gogh ate yellow paint. He thought yellow was a happy colour, so it would make him happy.
Van Gogh ate yellow paint. In the end it nearly killed him, but he wanted to be happy.
Don’t we all?
We would do anything for happiness, anything for love.
So is that not why she stays with him. She stays even though he is toxic. Even though he is the yellow paint.
Even when he cheats, when he poisons her joy. He makes her happy.
He is toxic, he destroys her inside. But sometimes, he makes her smile, sometimes he makes her happy.
She just wants to be happy. We all just want to be happy. Sometimes we all eat the yellow paint.
Yellow
Love in Nine Lives By Tor L
Kitten days
You began so small, a tender song
Each day was bright each night was long
Each hiss and squeak
A gentle peek
Tiny paws enjoy each day
We'd play and play, you graceful Faye
You arrived here with not even a den love begins with a playful friend
Growing grace
Hunting creatures overnight
You brought them home with great delight
Though not without disgust, I knew
I would love you always, through and through
You were gone all day and night
Roaming, guided by the moon, so bright
Though every day you'd return to me
Every day, in time for tea
Golden years
Now you lie in lazy silence
Windowsill, your perch of patience
Tracks still live, within the woods
Your memory of childhood
Is
felt within each purr of peace
Your life, nothing short of a masterpiece your purr, once drumming, fills the air
A love which lingers everywhere
Love by Florence T
Love is not loud – it softly speaks
Through shared eyes and rosy cheeks.
It blooms in the air, grows in place
Through a gentle and warm embrace. It dances in the morning sun, And lingers until the day is done.
It’s found in laughter, tears and time. The experience is truly worth a dime.
It’s fierce as fire, as cold as rain, Can create joy but also pain.
It lifts us high, pulls us close
It casts out fear with every dose.
Love is not loud – it is the key to life.
Bright and Forgiving by Sophie M
Unknowledgeable people laughing, gums out; there’s a bleeding war cackling at their backs; and I walk past knowing smiles and vacant teeth. Oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
A man with a beard knows as much as the sycamore gap: it’s nonexistent. The man is hiding behind layers of deceit and keratin. But his smile is so pretty and I think oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
Thinking that someone can call themselves an intellectual, yet believe in humankind’s greatest coping mechanism when they fall to their knees begging for the forgiveness of a stranger’s lips is an endeavouring beauty. Oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
My father had a warm persona but a whipping tongue licked with rage and inebriation, but, in days where the son shone brighter and the air grew thinner: I know he thought: oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
A tawny city knows the footfall of druggie and a politician, but the city’s extensive knowledge cannot differentiate in his mind. Their footfall echoes the antiquity of a thought that sounded like: oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
Two naive women sharing a cigarette scared of the smoke they can’t inhale, they only wanted an excuse to see the other’s face framed by the flame from a stolen lighter. Oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
A convoluted solider with polluted bias, waves a final goodbye to people that knew him, trading it for shivering his dozenth salute to people that don’t. He wishes he listened to history lessons and the knowing teacher, who praised those who thought oh, how I love this bright forgiving world!
My bleeding gums and my bearded tree and my flourished christianity and my inebriated father and my political drugs and my mouth-dwelling smoke and my saluting dignities. Follow me to the end of days to my happiest and truest institutionthe dark pettiness of my bed. Here I will sleep, dreaming away my potential and admiring this bright and forgiving world.
Sixth Form
Hide and Seek by Lola S
Ribs are strutting - hard, containing
Something wet and warm
Sneaking, peeking, soft emerging
Hurt in purest form
Who is this imp? Surreptitious
Twirling around the bone
Dropping eyes and squatting down Callous. Cool. Alone.
It glances, furtive, down long oesophagus
Lamely moving, frail
Something draws you further in;
The belly of the whale
Stomach grumbles; hunger is Abundant. Sickness sinks
Brain ill, is this dying?
The goblin simply winks
This pixie- fiend- would disappear If we could get away from here
But its eyes are buggy, cheeks too sallow
The feeling dims to lame
Starving in the stomach, creature Starts to thin and wane
Curious, head tilting, flesh
Shame runs through the blood
It still chases, firms the sluggish Wade through muscle- mud
This life has changed it, inside out
Exposure - poor and grey, Still crouched behind a rib cage bone, From truth it hides away
Perhaps the thing could live, outside, If it didn’t have to hide.
The Golden Rule
The sheep's soft bleat blew Love into the wind, It bore the mark of the divine, so clearly, Our hearts in rapture, enraptured. Never end! This wind moved us; we soared to find the Lovely, "Cease not!" we'd shout for your hearts are ablaze Love will guide you to do no wrong, Eros aims true. Rain bangs on hearts of stone, a scar, a graze erodes difference. Silver linings of tears.
A cloak pawned off; you must protect Neighbours in arms. Hearts beat softly, pounding war drums. "Love thy neighbour!" a general's command. "Through thick, through thin, through blood, through death, Hold him, hold her, hold tight and hold no other. Love them on their heartless torsos, their loveless skulls."
A preacher's soft lullaby drifts along the sweet wind of battle.
Love?
by Isi F (Sixth Form Winner)
How do l even begin
To transcribe all it means to love
Upon a mere sheet of paper?
I could rant about how this paper was once alive, Living and breathing as a tree, Bark adorning it like the wrinkles engraved upon my grandmother's Face. And perhaps there's something poetic About how similar I am to my grandma, More so than my own mother, Although I practically wear a bad forgery Of her face upon my own.
Then I could talk about now everything is cyclical, Connected, Intertwined - I write this upon the tree Whose branches
Started this whole tangent. Perhaps to love is to realise that connection, To momentarily experience the world as an extension Of yourself. Feel me wind as your breath, See bolts of lightning as the veins Under your skin, watch the beating of your heart Of your heart mirror the passing of timeSometimes slow and sluggish, Sometimes sprinting Away from you as you scramble to reclaim Your breath
But I am young and know nothing Of love,
And I still don't know now where to Begin.
I. The Dust’s Story
Trenchcoated wardens stand vigil,
Drenched in napalm dreams,
In lines near where the mighty tendrils run
Down and deep and wrap around our hearts,
Manacled to this unforgiving earth.
Silhouetted condors flaking in the sun
Dance and kites,
Drifting listless in corrosive storms
With thoughts of forgiveness on their wings,
Mourn the loss of each warden as they disappear in neon haze,
And out towards the edge of night.
The tendrils run through every heart,
And every cage of every heart,
And through their dusty reach they bind,
Each breathing soul into singularity,
Marbled gold tracing causeways through our collective breath.
But the dust that binds us, sickens us,
For it has no warmth of its own,
Only that which it steals and chokes out lifeless,
It is connection as cough medicine,
A remedy for the scourge of feeling,
Curbing emotions into an illusion of compassion,
Imagination trapped between the starless gulfs
Of the moonshine off reflected greed.
II. The Lovers’ Story
At the outer edge of the dust network is a glass cube,
Containing within its walls, an expanse
Of bleak, white nothingness, blinding, And a young couple, sitting back-to-back, Naked and joined with tender threads of silk,
Fraying with every second.
Around them were images of nuclear dreams, And nightmares chained to cigarettes, And orphans floating in seas of body bags,
Under their voyeuristic eyes.
A series of vines starts to climb between their backs, And shudders into decay as it reaches their hearts
Which cannot escape the dust which claws inside of them,
And into the harshness of the snow which flows in their veins.
The fragile threads snap and separate, cut by the Spear of their reflection,
In the mirrored walls of iconoclastic silence,
III. The Child’s Story
And at its cortex, a child weeping
Over an altar of wood,
For a Statue of humanity, draped in black, And stained with nicotine rivers
Bleeding out from her beneath her breasts.
In her right hand a great ash spear, to match her ashen eyes, And in her left, a glass rose, or what was once a glass rose,
Now, just a stem and dust falling in perpetual chains,
And on her head, a helmet, tarnished and dented,
Barely concealing the grimace of her smile,
As she turns to the child and bares her teeth.
The child shrinks away, hiding in the innocent edge of the Statue’s shadow,
A record scratching, away in the child’s throat, and wretches out in blood, a scream;
Would Venusians weep for our children as we weep for ourselves, Or as we weep for the foxes and deer which lie on the sides of motorways,
Caught briefly in the rearview mirror of a passing lorry, and then drift into nothingness?
And do we weep for foreign children as we weep for English children, Or are they to us as carrion, thought of only long enough to avoid?
And upon the altar, the child pours herself out,
Blood mixing with the dust into slurry, for the love of a humanity
Which stands, a corpse in battle dress, above the seas of body bags,
Which crash upon the altar and wash away the child’s blood
And the cigarette ash of her burdened soul
And a talking penguin mesomorph collapses on the horizon of obscurity, And fades into the Statue before disappearing in a pollen cloud of doves.
IV. (Epilogue) The Android’s Story
In the wreckage of obscenity, And the settling clouds of dust, The Android reaches out her copper hand, And gently caresses the feathered head
Of a resting Eider, who rests on the clifftop in solemnity, his head nestled into his back, waking him. Her other hand, tarnished blue with tears, Unhooks a rusted latch on her chest, And opens up the hollow to the air. She lifts the sea duck towards her, And sits him in her bosom, to sleep, Connected to a lowly heart.
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” William Wordsworth
RGS POET OF THE YEAR 2025