Readers are being urged to vote for young poet Cameron McGaughey who is the only finalist from Northern Ireland in the UK wide Poetry Games Competition for young writers.
Cameron’s mum is Gillian McGaughey, honorary secretary of St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast.
His poem, entitled The Starlight Road, can be read below.
If you are impressed by the poem, and would like to support Cameron, please go to the following link Http://www.youngwriters.co.uk/poetry-gamesvoting.php and register your vote.
Voting closes on January 14 2014.
The Starlight Road
The road I long to travel features on no map.
No signposts, no pavements or coloured traffic lights.
No beginning and no end , no lanes marked out in white,
Yet ageless and matchless and dazzlingly bright.
The road I want to travel cannot be found by day.
Warm sunshine and dark shadow obscure its diamond ray.
But with the setting sun and the dying of the light,
I know my road awaits me, stretching off into the night.
It appears at first a glimmer – just a twinkle in the sky,
And as the dark grows deeper, sprays of glitter catch my eye.
Like diamonds sewn on velvet glistening bright against the night,
My starlight road unravels a thousand points of light.
I try in vain to count them but their number is too great.
They sparkle and they shimmer and silently they wait
In clustered constellations whose shapes I track and trace.
A plough, a belt, a hunter all sparkling in space.
Astrologers say my future is written in the stars,
Like some vast dot–to–dot predicts my fate
And planets in conjunction or at odds
Determine my successes and my flaws.
“Ignore such hocus pocus!” science scoffs
“These stars are only molten rocks and stone,
Great lifeless boulders orbiting the sun,
Your destiny is yours and yours alone.”
One day I’ll walk along my starlight pass
To find those jewelled worlds so far away.
Perhaps I’ll find their glint is that of glass
Through which another watches me today.
Cameron McGaughey
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