Winning poems 2025
Congratulations to our 2025 winners! If You're a Poet, We Want to Know it! Volume 13 2025 -"Āpōpō/ Tomorrow"
Read a compilation of the entries in the Kāpiti Coast District Libraries’ annual poetry competition, run in conjunction with National Poetry Day 2025 - If You're a Poet, We Want to Know it! Volume 13 2025 -"Āpōpō/ Tomorrow
Children’s category
1st Place – Children’s category
Tomorow
Tomorrow with you feels wild and bright,
like running through thunder just chasing the light.
We ride on seconds like waves on the sea,
no map, no rules, just you and me.
Skyscrapers blink like they know our names,
we laugh like rebels in midnight games.
Hope in our hands, sky in our view,
every wrong turn still leads to you.
Whatever storms the world might send,
with you, tomorrow will always bend.
Just me and you my best friend.
Georgia Dunn
2nd Place – Children’s Category
Waiting For Tomorrow
Tomorrow feels like a door I can't open yet.
I hold my ear close, hoping to hear something good.
Maybe cries, maybe laughter, maybe something even better.
It makes my heart race, and fills me with excitement.
I wonder what secrets are hidden behind tomorrow.
It’s full of stories I have not heard yet.
But I know I'll walk through the door soon.
And find out what's waiting for me on the other side
In my tomorrow.
Charlotte Woolhouse
3rd Place – Children’s Category
Poem of Tomorrow
Tomorrow will be fun
On my way to tomorrow
Made for tomorrow
Run to tomorrow
Raised for tomorrow
Out for tomorrow
Winning because of tomorrow
Charlie Bean
Honourable Mentions – Children’s Category
Poem About Tomorrow
The hike up to the hut.
Aotearoa's beautiful bush, now lies a white hush.
The hills lost there green as the white comes,
Tucked away the bush rests, it’s probably snow.
It covers roofs of the old destroyed farm sheds,
On the stooped shoulders of sheep,
On the long pause of fences stretched across the fields.
Kea wheel low over mountain roads,
Startling the quiet with their loud noise.
the ponds unmoving, it's settled in for snow.
Where'd all the sun go.
I hope it’s all gone by tomorrow.
William Gibbins
Tomorrow
Tomorrow will eventually come like a ripening plum.
Once tomorrow has come it can have highs and lows but you will never know.
Mostly unknown yet the seeds have been sown.
Onwards with your future more strokes for your picture.
Resting in the night beginning with the light.
Ready to start your day and hoping the next will not betray.
Only slightly awake so many directions to take.
When will tomorrow come.
Noah Harris
Tomorrow
Tomorrow waits in silence, a page untouched by time.
It breathes beyond the edge of now,
Unseen, but certain.
Shadows of today stretch forward,
Not to repeat,
But to transform.
In its stillness,
The weight of choice gathers.
Every breath a step,
Each thought a thread in its vast design.
Lacee Hughes
Teens’ category
1st Place – Teens’ category
Tomorrows Wake
Tomorrow an expectancy of reality
Tomorrow, barred from humanity
Like Gaza’s people’s sanity
For hope, for food
For light, for life
For a tomorrow where life isn’t strife
Saftey, no strain, for food on a plate
For love, for light, for the right to life
Come back for them, let them breathe again, safety lies ahead
In tomorrow
Elijah Byer
2nd Place – Teens’ category
Pieces
There's this feeling I get
When it's just me and the darkness
That the days come and go
And we're all just pieces on a game board
Waiting for someone else to move us
Tell us what to do, where to go
I wonder if tomorrow will be different
Maybe I'll roll a six
Or maybe my piece will get knocked over
I'll just have to wait until tomorrow.
Rose Kearney
3rd Place – Teens’ category
For Logan: Fiery Dreams
Tomorrow is nigh
And you might dream high.
Like a raging inferno
Your dreams are like a phoenix, majestic and bold,
Beckoning you to fulfil some desire of old.
Tomorrow is nigh
And some people’s dreams end with a sigh.
Those are not my dreams.
Mine end in victorious light.
For I am right. I am right. This is my fight.
Kal-El Martinez
Honourable Mention – Teens’ category
Tomorrow never ends
Tomorrow never ends it only continues on and on never stopping for anyone on one
another day another night another dawn and dusk.
Raining Poring.The sun is,just boring .tomorrow the sun will rise but some will not so just see tomorrow is a gift a gift in breath.
Lucy Connor
Adults’ category
1st Place – Adults’ category
Dedicated to Robyn M. Webster
'I spend half the day exhaling, and the other half
holding my breath', as Toledo said. That bleakness,
it can cling to flesh; it sets like motor oil, a suffocating
skin I cannot rend apart. That ever-easy silence that
I join you in, my Brynn, is cleansing — we swim
in parallel, and your waters try to strip away the resin.
My gothic slumps against the bedroom door, still present;
for tomorrow is a peat bog — that ever-distant nothing,
a blurry something bounded somewhere in an icy void.
Let us be the drone played beneath the constant noise.
Helena Kirkaldy
2nd Place – Adults’ category
For my Moko
Dawn chorus, a flicker of chartreuse velvet feathers and the rusty swing call of Korimako.
A river of grief, gushed deep, under blood red mountains.
The golden milk ran dry, in an agony that iced over my bones, twenty one years ago, tomorrow. Was full of sorrow, two hearts torn apart, your small body placed in a stranger's arms.
Pēpi’s first cry like birdsong, my own like the chasmic mourning of a humpback mother whale.
Unbeknown to me, was the silver lining of whenua planted beneath a Kōwhai tree.
Now a bright yellow symphony, for tonight we celebrate, our whānau to reunite!
I sing waiata, pray kārakia, tucked into my kete is a pounamu gift, green as the wild flowing awa.
Āpōpō, tomorrow, after a fire lit, I will be rekindled with my daughter, and my grandchild.
Arms wide open, I’ll whisper, Mōrena my moko, haere mai, welcome home.
Danielle Deluka
3rd Place – Adults’ category
Morning after
Before the birds shut up
before the neighbours are up
before the bus grinds up the hill
before the sun sucks up the last bit of dark
I make coffee, you make more toast
we sit peacefully
balanced on the brim of last night
dangling our feet in today
Mary Cresswell
Honourable Mention – Adults’ category
Carpe diem
Carpe diem, says Mother.
So I do.
I burn and blaze and seize the day
Through the fog, the pain,
I carpe diem, hard.
And I dream of tomorrow
And tomorrow is a puppy
Snug,
Under my quilt, fuzzy. Warm.
Carpe diem, he says. And I do.
Shreyasi Majumdar
Honourable Mention – Adults’ category
A Garment for Tomorrow
At night, she steals sleeper’s dreams
and snakes her counted beginning.
The yarn grazes her fingers
and she throws it like a lifeline to the carpet.
She pulls through again.
Under the hook’s repetition,
her eyelids borrow time
and she whittles worlds as skeins shrivel,
meditating yesterday's thoughts
into a garment for tomorrow.
Willow Noir