Congratulations to Write Out Loud team member Graham Sherwood, who has won the Milton Keynes Litfest poetry prize for the second time in three years. Graham manages the profile section for Write Out Loud welcoming all new subscribers, and as a member of the moderating team reads every poem and comment placed on the website. He first won the MK poetry prize in 2024 with his poem ‘MK Fortean’. This year the competition theme was ‘The Trees’, and Graham triumphed again with a poem about a discarded apple core growing into a roadside tree.

He said: “My entry seemed to capture the judges’ imagination. I am doubly delighted as they approved of the short lines!” 

 

BRAEBURN

by Graham Sherwood

 

there’s a place 

I often pass, where 

a half-eaten apple core,

the remnants 

of a hasty lunch, 

wantonly tossed from

the window of a passing 

car, has taken root,

ten years undisturbed, 

lying buried beneath 

myriad roadside detritus,

today, on an uncut verge 

beside the busy A422, 

a perfectly shaped

magnificent Braeburn 

stands laden with plump 

ripe fruit, never harvested, 

a proud crimson beacon 

of accidental recycling

amongst the dowdy bracken.

 

MK Lit Fest run an annual festival that includes a poetry competition. This year the subject was ‘The Trees’, in recognition of the fact that there are more than 22 million planted trees in an ‘urban forest’ within the city of Milton Keynes. A competition anthology, MinK 6 The Trees, has just been published.

The festival also launched the Raising Voices Storymap, an interactive map of Milton Keynes with pins where poetry celebrates that particular part of the city. When clicked on, the map opens up to show the place, the poem, and an audio recital of it.

 

Some of the contributors to the Milton Keynes Storymap at the festival 

 

PHOTOGRAPHS: ESPEY PHOTOGRAPHY