2026 Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Contest Winners

Poetry d’Amour

2026 Love Poetry Contest Winners

Poetry d’Amour has invited poets to write into the many forms of love since 2012. Run by WA Poets Inc., the international competition is devoted specifically to love poetry, interpreted broadly across intimacy, family, memory, place, grief, companionship and desire.

More than 500 poems were entered in the 2026 competition. In WA Poets’ research identifying eight global love-poetry competitions, three are English-only; among those eight, Poetry d’Amour is the only one to produce a physical print anthology.

That annual anthology gives each year’s competition a life beyond the awards themselves: a physical record of the selected poems, held together in print. Here we present the 2026 prize winners, the judge’s report, and the nine winning poems in full.

Deanne Leber, judge of the 2026 Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Contest
The Judge

Introducing the 2026 Judge — Deanne Leber

Deanne Leber is a poet from Boorloo – Perth. Deanne has been sharing her work at readings, festivals and community events for over thirty years. She has independently published three collections of poetry. Book of Days was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards in 2006. Constellations, which was the creative component of her PhD work at Edith Cowan University, was a finalist in the Contemporary category of the 2022 International Book Awards. Constellations is a series of 88 erasure poems, based upon the myths and histories of celestial constellations. Deanne’s chapbook, How to Throw Stones, was launched as part of the Perth Poetry Festival in 2025 and forms part of Deanne’s upcoming collection of poetry, The Glass Cactus. Deanne’s work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Brushstrokes, Poetry d’Amour, Creatrix, as well as the 2024 ACU Prize for Poetry anthology, Faith.

2026 Poetry d’Amour

Judge’s Report

Welcome to this celebration of heart songs. As judge of this year’s Poetry d’Amour Competition, I feel incredibly privileged to have been invited to participate in this wonderful event. The first poems I ever inked were love poems, and it is a subject that endures. Love poetry heals when convalescing, brings a crowd of mourners to a place of insight and acceptance, and sparks connections between each other. Sometimes love brings our difficult world into a gentler space, or when difficult emotions arise, such as grief, loss and separation, then perhaps to a place of introspection and understanding. A space where we can be held and inspired. A space where we can feel and from where we can heal.

I read over 500 poems for this year’s competition. Poems which explored the love between new lovers, the physical pull of skin beneath sheets, the gentle tug of a child’s hand, the warm purring in a lap. I read poems about lifetime lovers, people who had, miraculously, found a soul mate. Poems that made my heart skip. How love exists in the fragile moments before death steals everything but the glow of what it felt to love and to be loved. And how we carry this, transformed into words, becoming somehow manageable.

I swooned at the contents of our collective hearts! The ways we honour the moon, let small silences linger, the poem as an aperture. The poem as a rupture of the heart. I looked for diverse voices, beautiful lines, delicate rhythms and of course, how the topic of love was expressed. Love for pets, love for seasons, love for places and love for each other. The poetry submitted was a kaleidoscope of ways that love softens our lives.

When I had reviewed the poems and was ready to finalise a longlist, I activated the filter on the spreadsheet. This was a collision of math and poetry. How can numbers reflect the gorgeous, inspirational and beautiful poetry? I wish I had used a series of shaded gradients as a judging tool. I juggled poems around, reviewed scores, read and reread. The poems that reached the longlist moved me as a reader and as a poet. Each poem deserves recognition in its own way. But I would like to say to every person who submitted a poem, thank you. I am honoured to have read all of your work. To put pen to paper is an achievement, and to do it in a way that shows the best in all of us, is absolutely wonderful. I encourage you to keep writing. We need poetry and we need poetry that has been written with love. Congratulations to all longlisted poets. It was a marathon to reach the list, well done.

The shortlisted poems were outstanding. It was very difficult to settle on the winning poems, and to allocate the prizes. Every poem shortlisted, was in some way, breathtaking. These poems stayed with me throughout the judging process and I am excited for the poets, who deserve to be celebrated.

Commended

Bahlam Beek by Robert E. Shapiro · United States

The poet writes that they had dreamt of a café in Cairo in the 1970’s, where a song, Bahlam Beek, was playing on a cassette. The poem ends with the waiter explaining lines in the song:

I fall in love with you.
Then I dream of you
and fall more deeply in love with you

I kept returning to this poem and its lovely sentiment.

Commended

An Orb Spider Embroiders Her Love by B. R. Dionysius · Queensland

The spider in this poem, sustains a single thread which the poet skilfully weaves throughout the poem until:

she tested its tensile strength with her pizzicato,
unleashing a wine-glass tension that by morning failed –
embroidery unpicked, her silken love adrift as a ghost net.
Commended

Nimbus by Fiona Burrows · Western Australia

A mother reflects upon her daughter, strong, bright and fierce. A warrior, fist out, daughter of the sun. The last lines are a delight:

her leap off the slide like a
joyous shout from the birth canal
Highly Commended

Our Little Beach by Peter Mitchell · New South Wales

This poem reflects upon a love that has been forged for over three decades. There is a narrative about declining health, due to the symptoms of Parkinson’s.

His feet map the footpath slow-by-slow step.
Nerve ends ache as if pin-pinched,
toes vibrate like hummingbird wings.

and

His right-hand shakes as if a frightened bird.

This poem explores love and upholding the dignity of those we care about. A beautiful poem.

Highly Commended

Things We’ve Been by Henry Hayden · New South Wales

This poem rocks back and forth like a see-saw, with lines at times, bordering on hallucinatory, but never tipping over.

We were both of us in the forest, and you kept saying, And now we fall,
but we couldn’t fall. We were floating above the trees.
I touched a fingertip to your eye and sent ripples across it. I said, You make me sad.

The opening line:

I want to make a snow angel

transforms towards the end:

I was a snow angel
in the shape of your body

This poem has sadness, happiness and elements bordering on absurd, beautifully balanced.

Highly Commended

The Last Good Peach at the Bottom of the Bag by Kabal Briar · United States

This is a delightful poem, which beautifully captures the interplay between a couple, not wanting to be the one who eats the last peach in the bag.

The peach travels from bowl to counter, counter to fridge,
fridge to the shelf with batteries and takeout menus.
Neither of us admits to moving it there.

The poem highlights the forgoing of our own desires and pleasures, in order to bring pleasure to our loved ones.

You cut around the soft place without calling it ruined,
then divide what remains into two uneven pieces.
The larger half appears beside my laptop

The movement of the peach through the poem, the discussions about the peach, and the distribution of the peach, is intimate and funny. The interplay conceals a larger depth of emotion between the couple and highlights the everyday of life.

Highly Commended

The Edge of Everywhere by Jaya Penelope Mullumby · Western Australia

This poem is in four parts, and builds beautifully, place, land, love and grief. From the first line, which is also the title of the poem, we move:

At the edge of everywhere—
a wishbone curve of sea and sky

Images of bones, feathers, the deceased and ‘flight-stripped’ bodies of birds, fill the poem. The Irish princess, Mis, grieves for her father:

of the precise moment she found him
when the first crow-black feather
erupted from her skin

This poem is brimming with beautiful imagery and desire:

Do not yet dare to dream that one day I might step close
enough to lick your skin

By the poem’s end, vulnerability in love:

Fiddler crabs, I too am soft-bellied
easily unshelled
Second Prize

i loved you in all those wilding places by Dean Gessie · Canada

A poem which held me at close proximity, attentively reading and rereading. Memories unravelling, rich in place, country, filled with creatures, waters, landmarks. There are references throughout to Australia and this poem feels like a long adventure through this stunning landscape. It opens with the question: do you remember – and the poem explodes with wonderful, detailed and descriptive micro-moments. When reading this poem, I felt challenged by memory. If beautiful love exchanges and experiences are not remembered, are not written, honoured, where do they spillover to?

when we outsized mystery and remembrance with sauropod steps at broome reef and elephant rocks at greens pool and fresh snow angels at cradle mountain for our miscarried child?

This poem asks questions about memory and love, how physical landscapes unravel physical bodies, memories and emotions. At the poem’s end, we are left wondering what being human means:

and will we ever forget cocoon of bedrolls in the cold furnace at fool-uru and blue fingers and naked eyes to size stellar drift and eyelash ices to imagine imaginal cells in the human world?
First Prize

Sleeping In by Damen O’Brien · Queensland

The First Prize poem explores the gentle flow of loving and the rhythm of daily lives. The poem starts:

We wake some mornings, briefly innocent.

In these new mornings, birds call, neighbours greet each other, lawns are mowed. The poem builds, as they day grows longer and into the night:

There’ll be time for smeared lipstick, for the little
statuettes of wine bottles confusing the bench,
time for desperate scrolling and deleting, for
desecrations and their relief, commemorations
and for the thumping battles in our heads to begin

The rubbish truck arrives, in ‘roars and whines’ and by the end of the poem, the lovers, luxuriating in bed:

That’s when I’ll roll over,
or you’ll roll over and I’ll gently place one arm
on you and hope that you do not wake. When
we meet again as strangers in our sheets and get
to try again, as if there had never been a night.

These precious moments, sleeping in with a lover, safe, protected and loved, is understated but also sensual, intimate. Lovemaking appears in a passion, which is ultimately private and between the lovers. As readers, we are held at a close distance, we have insight but there are no visceral details of bodies, only the reference of ‘strangers in our sheets’. This is a poem to experience again and again.

Deanne Leber, 2026 Judge

The Results

2026 Prize Winners

First Prize

Sleeping In
Damen O’Brien

Second Prize

i loved you in all those wilding places
Dean Gessie

Highly Commended

Our Little Beach
Peter Mitchell

Things We’ve Been
Henry Hayden

The Last Good Peach at the Bottom of the Bag
Kabal Briar

The Edge of Everywhere
Jaya Penelope Mullumby

Commended

Nimbus
Fiona Burrows

An Orb Spider Embroiders Her Love
B. R. Dionysius

Bahlam Beek
Robert E. Shapiro

First Prize

Sleeping In

Damen O’Brien
We wake some mornings, briefly innocent.
Two birds, a peewee and a squeaker share the
shaking of the flutter out of a moth, dust rises.
My neighbour good-mornings a man with a
handlebar moustache and his Scottish Terrier.
The peewee wins round one. Each morning
the world resets all its preferences back to the
manufacturer’s settings, my neighbour begins
remodelling his lawn, cutting it down to size,
grading off the edges of a late-sleeper’s dreams.
The trolley boys at the grocery store rattle their
steeds like pockets full of change. A young woman,
woken early by even younger eagerness, marshals
her pram, lifts the nappy bag, loops the monkey-
tail snatch cord to the toddler and enters the war.
In this dewed moment, we don’t have to apologise,
we don’t have to regret, we don’t need forgiveness,
we have forgotten ourselves enough to be born
and the labour was the long night and no burden.
There’ll be time for smeared lipstick, for the little
statuettes of wine bottles confusing the bench,
time for desperate scrolling and deleting, for
desecrations and their relief, commemorations
and for the thumping battles in our heads to begin
but first the magpie makes its miraculous song,
the kookaburra laughs at him, the rubbish truck
starts its purposeful refrain of roars and whines
and we make the 15 minutes or 15 seconds
or the glorious hour of our waking, yawn
open like a promise. That’s when I’ll roll over,
or you’ll roll over and I’ll gently place one arm
on you and hope that you do not wake. When
we meet again as strangers in our sheets and get
to try again, as if there had never been a night.
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Second Prize

i loved you in all those wilding places

Dean Gessie
do you remember when the bottlenose and the humpback rode toboggans on the big red dunes and the steering wheel left Chevrolet in the small of your back while I pumped the horn?
when the twelve apostles led us to the grotto and the rockpool made christmas garland of your hair and we cut ourselves on mammoth molars spattered with spit and sweat and moan?
when we lost each other in the myrtle and leatherwood of the tarkine and I found you on your knees at the shell midden head humbled at ancient granola of bones and shit and lithic flakes?
when kangaroo and wallaroo and fat-tailed dunnart danced to the sound of didgeridoo in the blue opal mine and haboob dust made of you genie lamp and dry rub and one wish will do?
when the convicts carved the bogey hole and need and greed were gills in my neck and plumb line to free dive and we rode barrier chain through rollers and surf foam and salt spray?
when the sulphur of the lava tube was just one match struck in a fire triangle of great luck and abalone and scallop and your own sex were the bone and ivory of boob and belly worship?
when moonbow at rockpool at tableland made fishes of our bodies and we used ancient tails for paddles to undo the dust of the eucalyptus walk and swim the long open mid back O?
when the fan palms and the gum trees split the sandstone and rock stencils left animal reminders of your hips and you kissed me like an oxbow billabong desperate to flood and return?
when we camped with little penguins and listened to the pup contact calls of furry seals and climbed cliff to view the sun and skerries and neither of us said or named anything all day?
when we hiked the old cape track and stopped to resuscitate lungs and thighs and at the summit of subvolcanic walls and sorcerer screech we made inukshuk tantra of arms and legs?
and do you remember when we walked the ancient footfalls at mungo and I mistook I have loved you forever for out of africa the dune in your eye the shape of a million crescent moons?
when we bipedalled big drift and cursed the hard work of sand to sunset and how we found comfort in creature creep and wept because this was not so before and one time after?
when we circled the sinkhole of collapsed chamber roof and fed apple slices to pear-shaped possum and winter dew in blue hydrangea recalled our first date of blue heaven shake?
when we doubled rope and hope and rappelled the cave at riversleigh and hung in the dark like jurassic marsupials and I unbuckled spelunking gear at the girdle and found rainforest?
when we counted clutches of loggerhead eggs at two waters and sang the salvage grammar of the malgana and returned to shark bay on a vehicle barge bursting with caged feral cats?
when we split at capertee and you took joe’s loop through slot canyon and I on the three sisters saw you one among painted honeyeater and gathered up the berries of the mistletoe seller?
when we swam the blue bloom at jervis bay and sea sparkle countless as stars and I took you in my arms but you pushed me away and said, they fear us and the light is fear of us?
when we sculled the gorge in rainbow serpent among western bloodwood and cabbage palm and then paddled back to back laughing unmoved like children at the centre of the universe?
when we outsized mystery and remembrance with sauropod steps at broome reef and elephant rocks at greens pool and fresh snow angels at cradle mountain for our miscarried child?
and will we ever forget cocoon of bedrolls in the cold furnace at fool-uru and blue fingers and naked eyes to size stellar drift and eyelash ices to imagine imaginal cells in the human world?
↑ Return to winners
Highly Commended

Our Little Beach

Peter Mitchell
For Graham (Gra Gra) Baker
His feet map the footpath slow-by-slow step.
Nerve ends ache as if pin-pinched,
toes vibrate like hummingbird wings.
Parkinson’s sucks, he says.
His right-hand shakes as if a frightened bird.
For thirty-two years, our hands touch, smiles weave.
In the men’s toilets, we change—I into navy-blue Speedos, wait.
Undies around ankles,
his balance wobbles as if on a ship’s deck.
He increments swimming shorts up,
breathes in, adjusts button.
We snail-pace across clipped grass,
d
o
w
n
plastic matting—he leans on my right-arm.
Sand grains massage our feet.
Our hands touch, smiles weave.
On a sun-warmed spot
on this small crescent,
we drop towels, kick off thongs.
Ankle-high waves pull, push, eddy—
Simpson’s Creek,
Brunswick River,
Durrungbil Country, Bundjalung Nation—all ancient reciprocities.
We sit on Country—our visits relax muscles, minds.
On adjoining rocks,
two seagulls gossip.
On the south breakwater,
fishing lines arc through fragile blue.
We settle.
Gra Gra turns,
Our little beach, he says.
Our knees touch, hearts stitch.
↑ Return to winners
Highly Commended

Things We’ve Been

Henry Hayden
I want to make a snow angel, you said, but it was 40 degrees in the Sahara,
so you did jumping jacks against the flat back of a dune. I wanted to tell you,
Stop, but I couldn’t speak (I was a camel) and you kept on quick.
Your skin rubbed up newborn pink.
I saw the nose fall off the sphinx.
I burned my hump right up and became a horse.
I wanted to tell you, but by then you were sand.
We were trying to talk Mark Antony off the ledge of the Chrysler building, and you were holding the megaphone. He was wearing the blue suit from Punch-Drunk Love.
He said, Her and I met, and it was it. It was just it,
but he didn’t have a megaphone, so we couldn’t hear,
and when he jumped it ruined both of our careers.
We were playing jenga on the ISS. You kept saying, And now it falls,
before my turn, but it couldn’t fall cause there was no gravity,
the jenga tower floated above the table,
so we played on, getting frustrated
(the sweat flung from your forehead spun in slow globes).
There was one block left, and you plucked it from the air, and then there was nothing
between us.
The optometrist swapped my glass eyes for kaleidoscopes and you had a hundred mouths.
We were both of us in the forest. The party was over. You make me sad,
you said (a hundred times), and no light but the sirens and the stars on the bark.
I wrung my kaleidoscopes and watched the decimated trees be crystals.
We were in the pew of a pauper’s funeral waiting for the start cause no one told me that I was the celebrant. There were too many tallies in the long backs, your fingernails caked with scraped lacquer. We passed time like an alms dish, and you gave it our last two cents (and now we have nothing to eat).
I was the Princess of Bavaria, and you were the glass piano in my stomach,
and I had to be careful walking through doors. I had to learn Fur Elise.
(I am a monkey at the typewriter trying to explain you and it has been a million years)
You were Mark Antony and I had the megaphone and I said nothing at all
(and my pschent had a golden snake).
We were both of us in the forest, and you kept saying, And now we fall,
but we couldn’t fall. We were floating above the trees.
I touched a fingertip to your eye and sent ripples across it. I said, You make me sad.
She asked me for a light, but I couldn’t speak. I was a snow angel
in the shape of your body.
I slid along the floor like a shadow impressing it, and I didn’t have any pockets.
She asked me where I went, and I was far off in a bindle.
You gathered me with your things.
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Highly Commended

The Last Good Peach at the Bottom of the Bag

Kabal Briar
We find it after dinner, under the paper folded twice,
one peach without a bruise, cool from the market bin.
You say you are full. I say peaches upset my stomach,
which has never stopped me before and does not fool you now.
We leave it in the blue bowl beside the keys.
The next morning, you pack my lunch around it
but forget, very carefully, to put it in.
I move it beside your coffee mug.
You move it back.
By Wednesday, the kitchen has become ridiculous.
The peach travels from bowl to counter, counter to fridge,
fridge to the shelf with batteries and takeout menus.
Neither of us admits to moving it there.
Its skin darkens at the stem.
I test it with one finger and lie about what I feel.
You announce we should have bought plums.
I remind you that you hate plums.
You say that is not the point.
The paper bag waits beneath the sink,
holding the smell of every peach we already ate.
On Thursday, I hear the knife against the board.
You cut around the soft place without calling it ruined,
then divide what remains into two uneven pieces.
The larger half appears beside my laptop
on the saucer with the chip shaped like Tennessee.
Yours is gone before I reach the kitchen.
When I ask which half you took, you rinse the knife
and tell me the peach was not very good.
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Highly Commended

The Edge of Everywhere

Jaya Penelope Mullumby
Memories of Seven Mile Beach
1.
At the edge of everywhere—
a wishbone curve of sea and sky
I return to walk in dream
2.
The day the migratory birds fell from the sky
I pace the searing sand, gather black feathers
shards of translucent bone, lay them out
around the hollows where each flight-stripped
body struck the ground
and think of the grief of Mis— the Irish princess
searching among the slain for the body of her father
of the precise moment she found him
when the first crow-black feather
erupted from her skin
3.
We search the blue dunes for sea-strawberries—
salty-sweet as the aureole of a woman’s breast
You ask if we should swim to New Zealand
and I almost say yes
Do not yet dare to dream that one day I might step close
enough to lick your skin
4.
Dawn-a myriad of pockmarks embroider the beach
mandalas of balled-sand scattered around black exit wounds
Fiddler crabs, I too am soft-bellied
easily unshelled, sidle sideways when startled
risk little work best by the light of the moon
am easily erased by the tide’s
hungry tug
Seven Mile Beach refers to the stretch of coastline between Broken Head and Lennox Head in Northern new South Wales
Mis refers to The Romance of Mis and Dubh Ruis, an old Irish tale
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Commended

Nimbus

Fiona Burrows
it is the childhood hour
the afternoon lopes along, backlit
caramelised bore-lines gauge the depth of summer
and the dog runs his repeating path, an aureole
of buffalo grass, syrup
to the fruit flies
a charge crackles through the air
little glory
squints into the flame
her hair ignited, carrying valence
as she attracts chaff, a fringe of leaves
she is Nemean, fierce
light catches the updraft of her streaming flight
and she strikes into the soil
with clawed feet
my Heliade, daughter of the sun
the bells of her leonine dance, gongs and cymbals
hammer through the traffic hum
wearing a warrior pelt
sharing her ions with the gilded air
she raises her fist
and gold-leaf settles like burnished ash
in this momentary resin
her kindling is caught, candied
eidetic amber holds and traps her spin
her untamed loop
her leap off the slide like a
joyous shout from the birth canal
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Commended

An Orb Spider Embroiders Her Love

B. R. Dionysius
In the bakery morning you took your coffee out & had
a look to see if she survived the night’s squall, the wind,
& the many avian predators which needed to power up
after the weather unleashed. Only a single tripwire was
left hanging above your head – a god’s diadem crowning
the day, an elvish clothesline poorly installed, or a single
steel string left on a broken guitar. It was the very first
line that she threaded from the ancient callistemon to
the tin shed, like a surveyor measuring out the brief
future of her build. The anchor line that secured her
while sewing her gossamer firework as the glycerine
rain fell. The night before you’d filmed her finishing
off the sparkling hem of her New Year’s Eve party
dress, a five-minute catwalk expose circumnavigating
a fashion world of her own creation. At the end she
pulsed in the omphalos of her mesh masterpiece, tying
off her fisherman’s lines & like a solo harpist plucked
at her strings twice. You could see the whole ensemble
ripple as she tested its tensile strength with her pizzicato,
unleashing a wine-glass tension that by morning failed –
embroidery unpicked, her silken love adrift as a ghost net.
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Commended

Bahlam Beek

Robert E. Shapiro
You slipped out of bed to let me
sleep an extra hour. You smile
as I enter the kitchen.
I’d had one of those vivid dreams
that occur at the end of a long sleep.
I was back in the ochre dust
of Cairo in 1979. In the ahwa café,
the haze settled low
by the hookah on the carpet
rather than rose to the canopy.
A cassette played in high treble –
bahlam beek, bahlam beek,
bahlam beek, bahlam beek,
refrain on refrain on minor refrain.
I asked the waiter, what does this mean?
I fall in love with you.
Then I dream of you
and fall more deeply in love with you.
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