Write your way through it: Enter a poetry competition

GEORGE NEWS - What do you do when faced with a challenge? Do you make lists, divide the task into smaller parts, or push through like dynamite through a concrete wall?

If you are a poet, you might choose to write about the problem until the images on the page reveal a way forward.

This month, the 2025 Avbob Poetry Competition invites you to try the same. Think of a problem in your own life and translate it into words. Use rhythm, imagery and form to reshape the challenge and perhaps even glimpse a solution.

Poet and editor Megan Hall demonstrates exactly this with her poem titled "Ticking". Hall, whose debut collection Fourth Child (Modjaji, 2007) won the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2008, has a gift for transforming difficulties into moments of insight.

The deadline for entries is 30 November. Find more information on www.avbobpoetry.co.za. Register and submit up to 10 poems in any of South Africa's 11 official written languages on the Avbob Poetry website. - Compiled by Michelle Pienaar

Ticking

A house full of relics is what I'm living in,

heaped high to the ceiling, piled deep on the floor,

cutting out the light, blocking the door.

A house full of relics - bits of shell, stuffed heads,

tired old watches, too small clothes,

the smell of naphtha burning my nose.

But life's ticking stronger, the ticks resonate,

the rooms must be cleared, parcelled up, pulled into shape,

the relics pushed aside into corners, onto shelves:

so they can look on our lives but talk only to themselves.

Translate your feelings into words. Photo: Pexels