Congratulations to Cherie (Lower Sixth) who has won 3rd place in the Classical Association’s poetry competition. Cherie (pictured with Ms Briddock, Head of Classics) won 3rd place in the Senior Original category for her poem ‘Eating Prometheus’.

The judge, former New Zealand Poet Laureate, Prof. Selina Tusitala Marsh, said she was very impressed by Cherie’s work and that she had done incredibly well out of a very large number of entrants.

Ms. Heather Briddock, Head of Classics at Tormead, said “I am so pleased that Cherie has been recognised for her excellent, creative work surrounding the ancient world outside of the curriculum. There are many Classics related competitions on the Classical Association website and I hope that this encourages more Tormead students to enter. A huge well done, Cherie!”

The competition, launched this year, is open to anyone inspired by the ancient world. It was established in honour of the Classical Association’s President, Anne Carson. Dr Carson is an exceptional poet, classicist and translator, renowned for her innovative translations of ancient texts such as Sophocles’ Antigone and the poems of Sappho and Catullus, and for her book An Oresteia, which won the 2010 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She was the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Cherie’s winning poem can be read below.

Eating Prometheus
You are exposed flesh and a paralysed tongue,
burnt by the alpenglow, through an open lung;
the seared taste of iron from a blistered gash
fogs up your mournful eyes like volcanic ash.
A ravenous yearning, greedy, zealous shock
guides me to you: your limbs, draped against a rock,
alabaster and gaunt, framing the charred,
pulp of entrails; a red rose in a graveyard.
You hold out both doomed palms for me to feed on,
to justify that your curse is too far gone.
Instead, I fly towards and tear at your guts,
frenzy on sweet skin, until all that is thus
is mangled flesh, rotten and putrid and sour.
I smell it everywhere – how I devour!
The silence in between, the small moments in
which I don’t shred at your succulent, sweet skin –
a wall of liberty between me and you.
Yet I feel more ashamed when I am let loose.
Your dirty blood, I would drink in pitcherfuls.
The gods do spoon-feed me at small intervals,
and it is delicate, and it is sombre.
But, alas, I am made for this rough hunger,
this gaping chasm in which only dimmers
when I shovel great fistfuls of your innards
into my mouth, letting the blood trickle down
as if it were ambrosia, soothing lown.
When the sweat suddenly barrels down your face,
and a low howl rips from your chest, the disgrace
I feel is just not enough to separate
your blood from that of inferior fish-bait.
Not enough; I was made for this rough hunger.
This filthy beak of mine, I cleave and plunder.
But when I take flight and leave, and hope begins
to billow beneath your shameful and base sins,
the trepidation of my fateful return
only hurts you more. You grow bitter, I learn.
If my hunger allowed me to stop my beak,
what would I say to you, if Zeus let me speak?
Does my constant feeding derail you further
from those honourable morals you nurture?
Is this what you gave fire to people for?
I feed and feed; freedom just makes me want more.
To remain kind when cruelty infests one’s heart
I find it difficult, you must find it an art.