We are excited to share a brand-new poem, Finding a Voice – The Unread Books, written and performed by Iona Campbell, Worcestershire Young Poet Laureate 2024. This powerful piece highlights Iona's remarkable talent and demonstrates how much she has developed as a poet since winning over a year ago.

 

Finding a Voice - The Unread Books

  

We brood at the back of the bookshelf 

Stifled by a halter of dust 

Stagnating 

Waiting… 

Waiting 

We brood in continual lust 

  

Prologue 

  

Inky tears running down pristine pages 

So called ‘faded and monotone’ 

But we’ve never been read 

So how would they know 

  

Chapter 1 

  

Squeezed between two aged spines 

Lungs stifled, barely breathing  

Numb with bitter injustice  

We are devoid of feeling 

  

Chapter 2 

  

Tossed between yellowing pages 

Clamped in the grip of insufferable pain 

Of rotting, eerie corpses  

Marooned among tattered remains 

  

Chapter 3 

  

A cold, scaled, creature  

It’s misery vociferous  

It’s grieving cacophonous  

The darkness shares it’s home with us 

  

Chapter 4 

  

Tick, tick, tick 

Dust settling on each cover 

As we count down the days until… 

We’re silenced forever 

  

Chapter 5 

  

What does it take? 

Gold lettering? More dialogue? 

Or maybe it’s just a wait  

Until we reach the epilogue  

  

Epilogue  

  

We brood at the back of the bookshelf 

Stifled by a halter of dust  

Stagnating 

Waiting… 

Waiting 

But there’s so much more to us.