Ros Spencer Poetry Prize
2026 Prize Winners
The Ros Spencer Poetry Prize is presented by WA Poets Inc in memory of Ros Spencer, with the continuing support of Geoff Spencer and family. Open to original, unpublished poems on any theme, the prize creates an opportunity for selected work to appear in WA Poets’ biennial Brushstrokes anthology.
In 2026, the competition attracted more than 500 poems from across Australia. We are pleased to present the prize winners, Jaya Penelope’s complete judge’s report, and the nine prize-recognised poems below.
Introducing the 2026 Judge — Jaya Penelope
Jaya Penelope is a poet and oral storyteller from Walyalup/Fremantle. She has been part of Perth’s poetry and performance community for around two decades, performing, facilitating workshops and working in community creative-writing settings. She holds a Creative Writing degree from Curtin University, and her forthcoming collection, Impossible Tasks, will be published by WA Poets Publishing.
Judge’s Report
It was a pleasure and a privilege to undertake judging the 2026 Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. This year’s contest received over 500 entries from across the country, testament that a small but significant portion of Australians are reading, writing and practicing poetry, with its attendant rewards and frustrations, its capacity to bear witness to ordinary and extraordinary joys and losses, the wonders of our unique ecology, and the human and other than human presences alongside us.
My gratitude to Geoff Spencer and to WA Poets Inc for inviting me to be this year’s judge, and my heartfelt thanks to everyone who entered the contest for entrusting me with your work.
To select the long-list, I read for poems that elicited a visceral response: Emily Dickinson’s oft quoted top-of-my-head-coming-off aha, for poems that revised towards mystery, or were generous in the way that they invite the reader into their worlds, poems that provoked wonder or offered a necessary disenchantment.
The majority of entries were written in free verse, but there were some incursions into form and mode: notably the abecedarian, the haibun, zuihitsu and aubade. The natural world was a strong presence, birds particularly were a recurring motif, flying through or perching on branches within many of the poems.
Selecting a shortlist was an almost impossible task, and there were many worthy poems that weren’t included. Nevertheless, the ones that appear on the shortlist captured my attention immediately; haunting or provoking me to return to them for multiple re-readings, always revealing new layers. Congratulations to those on the shortlist, and thank you again to Geoff Spencer and family for continuing to support this vital art form. Without further ado the winning poems are:
First Prize
Microchimeric by Fiona Burrows
Addressed from mother to son, this poem explores microchimerism; the biological phenomenon of cells that can traverse boundaries between separate organisms. Employing the metaphor of the mythic Chimera, the poet investigates the porous boundaries between self and other, mother and child, micro and macro. The poem moves deftly between the scientific, the mythic, the intimate and the heroic to arrive at a sense of fierce wonder. It offers a provocation to readers to rethink perceived notions of motherhood as perennially gentle, closing with the triumphant image of mother as elemental, blazing her terrible fire…
Second Prize
Imago by Magdalena Ball
A poem of radical metamorphosis, the speaker grapples with anticipatory grief engendered by the dying-process of a loved one, most likely a parent. The poet’s voice is as liquid as the imago, both held and transforming inside its chrysalis. The poem’s couplets, with their walking cadence, shift between landscape, memory and dream. The poetic voice similarly shifts between the scientific, the intimate and an almost animist sensibility in which creatures from the natural world such as the blue-banded bee and the Lesser Wanderer are encountered as a reminder all is not lost. Subtle and generous, the poem offers something approaching consolation to those who are walking in liminal spaces of grief and loss.
Highly Commended
I could be the Broken Hill Motel by Kim Kenyon
The titular motel describes itself in detail in this persona poem with a light touch, observing the arrivals and departures of its (mainly) human inhabitants with a keen eye.
a cat fluent in shadow sidesteps a dripping gutter
The poem’s title slyly renders all that follows conditional, leaving the reader uncertain as to who or what is speaking and who or what has been cracked open to the morning in the penultimate line.
Perhaps it is the readers themselves who are left cracked open by this poem?
An Aubade with Warbles by Gaye McPhie
This poem repurposes the aubade; originally giving voice to reluctant lovers parting at dawn into the lament of a child given up for adoption by her biological mother. This is a clear-eyed poem, the child admits they do not know/cannot imagine how a mother and child say goodbye. But it is also a compassionate one, refusing to condemn the mother entirely for her act of abandonment. The presence of the absent mother is perhaps conflated with the warble of the magpie, an insubstantial thread of connection that continues to link child and mother, looping back to the opening image of black mourning ribbons.
Lost in the Fire by Siobhan Hodge
A poem that bears witness to the unfolding climate crisis, grounded in the specificity of the Perth hills in the wake of bushfire. This poem pays close attention to the fire’s impact, especially upon the animals who bear the brunt of the devastation.
The poem resists moralisation or drama, but lays the images of displaced and disoriented creatures quietly before the reader, allowing us to make our own conclusions about who may be culpable for these losses. The closing lines render the caught breath of grief at the death of a wren potent.
One little breath, a loss
to make all the difference.
Commended
In the Quiet Deep of Winter by Kay Cairns
A contained poem, panning from the vast but ephemeral images of the Canadian wilderness inwards to the devastating final image of five rusted bikes, symbolic of a brother’s unfulfilled potential and abandoned dreams.
The Book of Longing by Rhian Healy
A protean poem that engages in the surreal. Surprising images such as
The leaves of a frangipani, fat and rich,
glow like a middle-aged man’s skin.
turn upon repetition of the phrase the thing about… The result is an accumulation of mirage-like images that culminate in a mirror’s refusal to speak or explain itself. The poem like the mirror itself will not easily reveal its mysteries.
Whistle Up the Wrens by Krista Schmeling
I read this poem as a meditation upon the process of apprenticeship to place. The speaker learns through a kind of Mary Oliver like process of attention-as-devotion, modelled by a mentor to perceive the richness of a landscape that may otherwise be overlooked as barren
Someone else would regard these fingers of
rock desolate bones
barren, cruel even
Through the mutual practice of whistling up the wrens, both speaker and addressee access song as an act of memory capable of summoning both speaker and reader into the poem’s golden hour.
Syrian Spring by Jenny Magann
This calendar-like poem composed in six couplets, opens with an observation of equinox sunlight, and hinges around the image of doorway as personal observatory
this doorway is my Stonehenge, my Rujm el Hiri,
almanac of the equinox,
Whilst grounded in the local and the personal, the poems’ references to spring in Syria invite us to remember those who are experiencing political upheaval in places that seem far away and suggests that we are all connected by our experience of the migratory sweep of the seasons as they shift across our shared globe.
Jaya Penelope
August 2026
Winning Poems
First Prize
Microchimeric
Fiona Burrows
for my son
you have colonised me the way that stories become myth accumulating alteration on alteration built of bone, bile elemental babushka concealing alternating mutations your cells multiplied like invasive lichen in the faultlines of my massed rockface you began, traveller, heroic the long slow ascent of my cliffs and crags
we are undivided, hybrid goat-headed gods tamping the ground for an erupting breath entwined microbiota, permeable only to each other we transmit our reciprocal ecology like vital gas-bursts fetal, cytolytic death in life
son, dragon-horned and rising, serpentine from the sulphuric shimmer: a mother blazing her terrible fire
Second Prize
Imago
Magdalena Ball
What ghost is this, arriving unexpected scent of citrus and Pears soap
breaking my stride, clouding vision in the forest, wavelengths of light
infrared, ultraviolet, mitochondrial DNA light is energy, energy is life
a body in collapse requires a solution not a cardiac monitor displaying vital signs
heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen ventilating with regular beeps
a different body comes to me like Tiffany glass across the skin
insects rising in the air, a reminder all is not lost, blue-banded bee
metallic fur across its black abdomen shivering flight muscles, your body in situ
I watch the chrysalis, safe vantage point thoughts are non-physical
what cells survive the night, apoptosis as if wrapped in a cocoon
digesting itself, but still strong inside the dissolution
imaginal discs hold the blueprint of what comes next.
Lesser Wanderer on my hand a flicker of orange. Whose voice is this
singing in my ear, an old song I stop walking, the city recedes
something older moves in the dark distant hum of traffic
the call of night birds: tawny frogmouth Boobook owl, the eerie call
of a Stone-curlew the dream body feels no cold
walking together in ghostly silence our stories untethered to time
a Sunday kitchen, radio on Classic FM high-pitched laughter moving up the major scale.
After so much pain, is this finally joy the air turning colder, breath crystallising
through the carbon cycle, nothing is lost only changed in form: bacteria, viruses, fungi
nematodes making soil microbiome to microorganism
finding you transformed here in such an unlikely space
the body you once inhabited is empty a dream body walks beside me
light transformed, flickering every space another universe
an act of homage, an apology another chance. My face is wet
with rain, salty air, your immediacy
Highly Commended
I could be the Broken Hill Motel
Kim Kenyon
It’s evening. A two-tone commodore is parked by reception. White-washed concrete, peeling. Round the back there’s a sad scratch of astroturf, wonky picnic table damp with dew, a rusted yellow tin drowns half-smoked Winnie Blues.
By the bins, an automatic light flicks on. My squat hunch of a building inhales the nightly sonata of dog barks, indignant air brakes of a B-double, the slow slosh of a taxi displacing a puddle. Behind the fence, flying foxes rustle the pockets of a fig
Across the car park, there’s an anonymous reach of numbered rooms where air-conditioning units shudder. A cat fluent in shadow sidesteps a dripping gutter. Bugs agitate light, ash themselves. Each frosted glass table an island, flanked by empty silver chairs. The same five channels flicker through the drapes.
Inside, you’ll find a comfort of cold tiles that reach for carpet. Small milks, white mugs and plastic-packaged biscuits. A reassurance of crenulated pearlescent soap. Between thin white walls and a flammable bedspread, strangers sleep with private grief and the highway static of lives in transit.
And in the morning, there’s movement, the friendliness of setting forth. Tops of buildings blush, toilets flush through my small sliding windows. Mining cars leave early. A family checks their roof racks. The moon hooks on the horizon like a tie-down
ratchetting a full load of light. A flock of crimson rosellas catch the day under their wing. The gutter is a grubby witness, thistled taillights are feathered in dawn as one-by-one they leave me, cracked open to the morning, towels damp upon the floor.
Highly Commended
An Aubade with Warbles
Gaye McPhie
I do not know how long black ribbons filled our eyes. Seam of my spine pressed against yours as we labored. Fingers streaked the sky in lilac blood. Bruised. Torn apart in violet violence, I wore a crown of thorns, left traces in your womb. Taken before you could see me. Hold. Lips denied your breast, fists a tiny clench. Your young cheek turned away. Pillow yellow-wet in early light.
My new home a cribbed nursery of mourning babies, bustle of matron skirt. Dappled shadows on the ceiling. Strange hands on my skin. Magpie warble. I do not know how a mother and child say goodbye. One must leave one must stay. Wait. For a stranger to come, call me daughter. You in paisley and plaits, vanish sun-glassed into the street. Your scent lost on the breeze, voice a faint warble in morning air.
Highly Commended
Lost in the Fire
Siobhan Hodge
Wooroloo has braced for impact. Gums pull back, seep with oil. We are breathing between the blades, helicopters seeding clouds, sudden showers. The roaring builds and builds. A kangaroo hotfoots over tarmac, simmers between the trees, parrots shimmy upwards. A serrated wind, departing as we sip uneasy air.
Too much life is breathing out. We hang in the searing space, plumes curdling like syrup, staining sunset hills with warning. Moths rise in warning lights. I let the wheel rest on my palms, blood flickers like a divining rod. The smoke is cresting waves, seizing a new shore. The rest is more like history.
The next day horses snort over clouded water, ashen leavings are staked along the verge. Spillway of loss still grows. I usher hissing bobtails, trapdoor jaws creaking in terror, stop for dugite’s path, an oily ribbon spooling in hasty loops. Sneering scars slice Gidgegannup bush, kangaroos convalesce at the roadside but too many more were outrun. The road has warped, sticky river stoked to tar and back, sticks and stones smoulder without relief.
I leave the burning zone, slow for a galah shuttlecocked between the double lines. Miss the dive until I hear a plink, stutter at the stunned drop of a wren striking my window like grief. Slam on the brakes, scour the verge. Fingers stroke the door of an empty house, dark and soft, unburnt but gone. One little breath, a loss to make all the difference.
Commended
In the Quiet Deep of Winter
Kay Cairns
The documentary is set in Canada— spruces smothered in soft-puffed drifts of snow like seafoam, and a river of dark and fluid ice sifting through the landscape.
My brother once talked of moving there, to that wilderness, that stillness, the log cabin on his own land, the fire built from wood he’d split himself how he could live there in the quiet deep of winter.
When debt collectors took his home the dream was scaled down, to just a plot, a bit of a field somewhere in the country.
He lived his last days in our mother’s house surrounded by the boxed accumulation of the years and lying broken in the yard, five rusted bikes he was always going to fix.
Commended
The Book of Longing
Rhian Healy
The thing about water is that it wants to settle, no taking the higher ground, no storming the defences, and yet everything falls.
But light does not settle. Right now, there is a reflection off a tin roof, off the hipped edge of an old, burnished roof. The leaves of a frangipani, fat and rich,
glow like a middle-aged man’s skin. The thing about light is that it wears a cloak of bravery. But the thing about wind, the thing about wind,
is that it smiles and shrugs and picks your pocket. Beneath the wind, there is the distant hum of some obscure machine, rumbling.
The thing about windows is that they are not mirrors. A sheet of glass, a facet of light, a taste of salt. A shadow turns and the heat moves.
A ship loafs past the window. A mirror does not answer.
Commended
Whistle Up the Wrens
Krista Schmeling
It’s all there in the still light waning
Poppies losing their dress of gold sequins shimmy along the creek-bed and foliose lichens ride the imposing crests of shale down to the kangaroo gully
Someone else would regard these fingers of rock desolate bones barren, cruel even
I did
First, among the thin wash of rusty umbers its permanence so impermanent its hardness, a crumble of dry humour or haughty uncertainty
But you did not
The photo of you standing, surveying with equal surety weighted what would have otherwise seemed a dream
Long before you captured water in shallow ponds for the ducks and ibises Before you built this bird-hide nestled into the bedrock and filled it with life, with dreams of line and colour and beating hearts
Now slatey skywash out the glass doors and meditations on roundness follow sweet water left by a storm, like the musk of our tea steeped in gum blossoms Now you know about the wrens and robins I whispered you and you whistle them up with impossibly high notes, then bendy ones the shape of a pennywhistle even the buff-rumped thornbill comes, whistles back
And now when you drive at the golden hour sometimes you think of me
Maybe even if I sing on the fringes I am here with you
Commended
Syrian Spring
Jenny Magann
How sudden it seems, this brash sunlight pushing through the wide doorway. All summer broad eaves shield me from the sun’s harshness.
But this day is the reminder that it is the tilting of Earth that fixes my view of the seasons, the constant in the chaos. Seasons demand
to be remembered—this doorway is my Stonehenge, my Rujm el Hiri, almanac of the equinox, give or take a count of days.
Autumn starts with polished wooden floor ablaze. I let my eyes flinch, squeeze shut, but I am hopeful of temperate days, anticipating my Easter.
Gold leaves fall and pears ripen; waterbirds succumb to the call of Siberia where the ground is still frozen. And Syria imagines a spring that is coming.
Our world’s voyage through space and time seems unchangeable. Days a perpetual of dark and light. And so many springs that become winter again.