It’s National Poetry Day! To celebrate, we’re publishing the winner of the National Schools Poetry Award 2026.
‘The Left Spring’s Soft’ by Xavier Tapsell, a year 13 student from Tauranga Boys’ College, is the winner of the 2026 National Schools Poetry Award. The poem is set in lambing season and, Tapsell says, is about “two people who’ve drifted so far apart neither of them really knows how to close the gap. Every time they get close to something real, one of them backs off.”
Judge Rebecca Hawkes chose 10 poems as finalists from over 250 entries and then selected Tapsell’s poem as the overall winner. “The talent on display was astonishing,” she said. Hawkes said she was reading “for poems that froze me in place, that took the top of my head off. I read for lines I’d never heard before, and ways of seeing that felt complex and true, if not necessarily factual. With no information on the identities of the writers (only titles and numbers in a spreadsheet) I had to let each poem lead me by its own logic without the biographical context one often has to hand while editing elsewhere.”
Hawkes said the winning poem was “compassionate toward its subject, but also unflinching” and that it captured her “beyond my affinity for the rural gothic” with its depiction of an “archetypical taciturn kiwi bloke: a farmer left by his wife and son, isolated by geography and even vaster emotional distance.” Hawkes said that the specific details “give cinematic vividness to the farmer’s life – V cans clatter across the truck floor, shearing handpieces are oiled to quell shaking hands. The poem is rich with particularity – locations, textures, sounds: ‘Rain past Taihape, / yellow streaks smeared across the glass, / wipers dragging a dry, rhythmic scrape.'”
The emotional poignancy of Tapsell’s poem is in the unspoken, says Hawkes: “I admired the tactile concreteness this poem’s images, and its confidence in refraining from over-explanation, letting us sit with the inadequacy of language even where it is most needed. I have rarely been so enchanted by the inner workings of an old ute.”
Tapsell receives $500 in prize money, a $500 grant for his school library as well as a year’s membership of Read NZ Te Pou Muramura, a year’s membership of the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) and a year’s subscription to New Zealand literary journal Landfall.
The other nine finalists were: Roseleen Kaur (Yr 12, Botany Downs Secondary College), Sabrina Liu (Year 13, Kristin School), Charlotte Galvan (Yr 13, St Andrew’s College), Thomas Rowe Palmer (Yr 13, St Andrews’ College), Sara Assadi (Yr 13, Wellington Girls’ College), Miranda Yuan (Yr 12, Burnside High School), Jessica McIntosh (Yr 12, Hillmorton High School), Eve Hughes (Yr13, Cashmere High School) and Hanxi (Cicy) Chen (Yr 12, St Andrew’s College. Poems by all the finalists are available on the Schools Poetry Award website.
The Left Spring’s Soft – Xavier Tapsell
Rusted D-shackles in the footwell,
a flattened box of Winfield Red.
Twenty years on the same clay,
hands turn the ute on muscle alone.
His boy at the ramp, his whole life
packed into six boxes and a garbage bag,
a polo shirt buttoned where a flannel should be,
looking at the hills, his watch.
Anywhere but the house.
Ute’s running rough.
Needs a clean out.
The kettle was still whistling
when she carried her life out to the taxi. He’d gone
down to the woolshed instead. Oiled the
handpieces till his hands stopped shaking.
Rain past Taihape,
yellow streaks smeared across the glass,
wipers dragging a dry, rhythmic scrape.
Still got the house in Hamilton?
Sold it. Nothing there for me anyway.
Meat pies from the Gull station,
pastry flaking into the grease on his trousers,
two cans of V rolling against the floorboards
every time the ute took a corner.
The kauri chest—still got it?
In the back shed. Why?
Mum said you’d burn it before you’d let her take it.
Wellington,
some concrete flat, gray fence,
a rusty trampoline next door,
someone else’s vape smoke drifting over,
One can cracked open in an empty kitchen,
the tab stinging his thumb.
How’s the missus settling in?
Dad.
He turns the can in his hand,
Working up to something else.
Sorry. Slip of the tongue.
How’s he, then?
Good. Busy with his own move too.
Right.
Good.
He drains the can, sets it by the door.
Don’t overload the trailer.
The left spring’s soft.
No horn on the way out.
Window cracked a finger’s width for the smoke to bleed out,
but the truth stays buckled in the passenger seat.
In the trailing lights, the dark rides heavy in the tray
like a small boy waiting for a destination,
a passenger he can’t drop off
no matter how many times he checks the tie-downs.
Bruised grey at his own gate.
Not the house. The bottom paddock,
the twin ewes due.
The first one: black-faced, dead in the frost, its
mother five yards off, looking for sweet grass.
He doesn’t curse.
He picks up the shovel
and chops into the frozen clay,
burying the lamb early.
National Poetry Day is today, August 28. Find out what’s on near you on the website, here.
