Back in January, Headington Rye Oxford concluded the search for the new Poet Laureate. Octavia (Year 11) won the (metaphorical) laurels with her beautiful piece titled ‘Improved gravitational theory’. After helping to judge the brilliant year 8s in our Poetry By Heart final, her next commission was a poem for the Upper Fifth’s final Prayers.
Comparison
We compared the years we’d spent,
wedged now in our childhood
When time trickled slowly like the sun, dribbled
through the trees, dripping
on the shade like leaks in a roof.
Sometimes now when you’re alone you
might try and grab
handfuls of it but it bleeds
through your fingers and runs
down your arms.
What is this, anyway? That we have
learned, this urgency? We run
ever forward like the children
in the playground we used to be.
As we walk together, you stop to point at all
the places we used to laugh.
For a split second, the window refracts the sunlight and you, arm outstretched, almost
catch it in your fingertips.
It looks like the glint of your eyes the way
it’s shining at me now.
—Octavia (Year 11)
Dr Cassie Westwood said: “Octavia delivered this valediction with characteristic feeling and poise. We think it’s a lovely and entirely apt way to mark the end of Year 11’s time in the Senior School: balanced between retrospect and the future, aware of coming changes but nonetheless carefully attuned to the present moment. We look forward eagerly to her next piece!”
