Rhode Island Student Wins National Competition For Her Original Poem

PROVIDENCE, RI — A Providence student won a national poetry competition held in Washington, D.C. this week.

With her original poem, "Birdfolk at the End of the World," Classical High School junior Natasha Connolly won the 2023 companion competition to Poetry Out Loud, Poetry Ourselves.

Connolly traveled to Washington, D.C., on May 9 and May 10 to compete in the National Endowment for the Arts' Poetry Out Loud Annual National Finals as Rhode Island’s Poetry Out Loud State Champion.

In Washington, she also took part in the optional competition, "Poetry Ourselves," where she submitted an original poem and won first prize. The competition was curated by poet Mahogany L. Browne.

Connolly’s Poem reads:

Birdfolk at the End of the World
By Natasha B. Connolly

you did not bear wings until the last of it,

the final days when the world burned and we set fire to its ashes.

only then did they trace the curve of your bones,

admiring: here is someone who was made for flight.

the shadow of your own escape might swallow you

when acid oozes from the sky like rain

the dark clouds, the drops falling like feathers

the imperceptible outline of you against the night

sprung from your shoulders, your late-grown wings

like crumpled paper, flattened out by the wind.

nothing special, these days, your trash protrusions,

your traitorous and inhuman back, your spine so bright.

in the atomic cloud we are all sick, all dying, all dead,

so what is one more broken thing carving out its home against the sky?

the sky is coming down in a downpour all around you,

yet the crowd surrounds you whispering fly, fall, fight.