Boxing Day Test by Cecilia White won the Cricket Poetry award for 2011.

Hundreds of poets from the UK, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia submitted a poem for the third annual Cricket Poetry Award competition, in which twenty were selected to be publicly read by actors on the 15th September 2011.
Based on the reading and crowd response, the last four poems were chosen and re-read on the 6th October at the Cricket Art Prize opening event, Members Pavilion, Sydney Cricket Ground.

The judges, Louise Wakeling and Amanda Shalala felt that a majority of the poems were of a very high standard and as such, they had a challenging time refining the collection down to twenty for the first public reading; then at the live readings night, the general public voted for the last four to be re-read at the Cricket Art Prize opening.

Louise and Amanda affirmed “…we chose our top twenty in terms of what worked for us as poetry; based on a skilled fusion of technical skills and conventions, including phonics, insights and emotion.”

Boxing Day Test by Cecilia White won the Cricket Poetry award for 2011.
Her poem powerfully describes the retrospective, compassionate thoughts and feelings we feel when watching a test match on television on a hot summers day…

Boxing Day Test by Cecilia White

twelfth man leaves the field, we tumble back to our places
sitting cross-legged below a semi-circle of lanky shinned uncles.
men, exhausted by another year’s hard labour
and christmas day.

our skin sticks to itself on boxing day in new south wales.
the geography of each body is irrigated by sweat
it is impossible to imagine standing outside
for each over, and over again.
the cork and willow clap in the dry summer heat  
of another state.

our uncles lean into the room,
lean forward towards the box, as if they were next bat.
tensing muscles deep in bare redbrowned arms
they are in the memory position,
revisiting lives they dreamed as boys when
they could imagine up a roaring crowd
that would lift them high above the drudgery
of normal men.