The Echoes poetry competition to celebrate Write Out Loud's 20th anniversary is now open.  Judged by Neil Astley.

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Ultimatum.

An avarice for sun

And the daydream 

Rent asunder

By an ineluctable geography,

As the realms couldn't mesh

For warriors seasoned

Yet perplexed, still

Murmuring an anthem

That no longer does the trick,

Causing nobody to shapeshift 

Into the needed saviour

Who wouldn't bow down

To the fateful ultimatum...

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(Mis)aligned...

Anchored to anachronisms,

Unnerved by the footfall

Of antiquity, wavering

Before the wink

Of posterity, clinging

To an infantile innocence

As compass through

The maze of counterfeit

Embraces, pleading

For alignment of era,

Purpose, honesty

On faces...

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Tightrope.

The tightrope hovers,

Tempting the less faint of heart

To walk, or wonder...

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Quixote.

Windswept quester, 

Defector from certainty, 

Wishing to be absolved

Of a stuttering resolve, 

Imbued now with a fervour

Akin to a renewal of will, 

Detecting the susurrus

Of an aphorism to be, 

Or some relentless motif

That will stand sentinel

At every turn

Of this curious carnival

To be traversed,

Before every incongruity 

Melts into the stranglehold

...

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Silt.

A serpentine saviour

Won't be a saviour

At all, and irony

Irrigates this soil,

After all;

 

Yet there's a minor chord

Humbly persisting in truth,

A minor skew tending

Towards what we should do:

Some thinly-veiled idealism

That might guide

Our better angels still,

If only we can find

That spark of life

In the silt...

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