Mendham Student Wins Prestigious Poetry Competition
By Ellie Kourkoulakos
On Friday, October 10, West Morris Mendham senior Isabella Haddock was awarded third place in a poetry competition at the Morristown Festival of Books. Her successful poem, “Forget-Me-Not,” was inspired by a eulogy she wrote a few years ago for her grandmother.
Isabella enjoyed reading fairy tales and fairy stories as well as building and looking for fairy houses with her grandmother, who was an artist. “She just made my childhood so magical,” she said. She described how flower fairies were “the ones that were responsible for bringing color and flowers and joy.” When she read the prompt for the competition, “the color red,” she immediately thought of her childhood, which was filled with magic created by her artistic grandmother. “In a way, she was a flower fairy, and I hadn't known it.”
“I love writing, and I aspire to be an author one day,” said Isabella. She takes on both long-term and short-term projects. For instance, she is currently writing a children’s book with illustrator Dylan Parks, another Mendham student, that will be published soon. She also enjoys novel writing, screenwriting, and journalistic writing. “I love how deep and descriptive you can go and how much you can explore with the creativity of writing longer-length pieces,” she added.
Isabella draws inspiration for her stories from Margaret Atwood’s creative language and rhythm as well as Jane Austen’s writing style.
When asked what writing means to her, she described that “we write, you know, to immerse ourselves into a world, to experience things, but we also write to share messages and morals and lessons.”
Aside from writing, she competes in horseback riding, plays the violin in the WMM Orchestra, is a member of FBLA, and works as an Integrated Energy Therapist.
Photos courtesy of Isabella Haddock
“Forget-Me-Not”
By Isabella Haddock
We searched the gardens when I was only a babe,
Grandmother and I, looking for beautiful things
Rare things of vibrance and wonder
And everything in between
The flower fairies that I swore
Lived beyond the pages of our picture books
The ones I’d build houses for
Of toadstools and cotton and mica
The ones I’d want to catch a glimpse of so badly—
Only a glimpse
But I lost my last tooth;
That made me a girl
I hid my molar from the tooth fairy
So as to convince her that I hadn’t grown up
Houses emptied
Gardens too
And only tiles
Would catch our tears
Tiles on the
Bathroom floor
That I cried on
Until I
Couldn’t
Breathe
I stopped wearing my lilac perfume
And listening to our favorite songs
To leave myself nothing
To associate that December with
Am I still a girl?
Perhaps I’ve grown too old to call myself that
My perfume smells of amber and saffron
And old favorites of ours
Have been plucked from playlists
But in our gardens
Thickets of marigolds bloom crimson
Behind bushes that sink
With the weight of scarlet roses
With much to carry
Yet all the more beautiful
And each dandelion is wished upon
And sent to the skies
Sometimes I catch a pair of iridescent wings
Under the forget-me-nots
And I laugh;
I’ve learned to believe in them again
For they are the ones that bring color to the world
Illustrate the earth with their constellations of daisies
And dapple their meadows with the very primroses
That Grandmother would leave for me by the fountain
And although I can’t always see them with my eyes
I can promise that flower fairies are as real as can be
And I need not have searched all those years
For my Flower Fairy was right by my side