January Contest: "New Beginnings" - OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS

January Poetry Contest: "New Beginnings"

Happy New Year, poets! Our first contest of 2026 celebrates fresh starts.

Theme: New Beginnings

Interpret this however you wish:

• New Year resolutions and reflections
• Starting over after loss or change
• The first of anything: first day, first love, first step
• Dawn, spring, birth, rebirth
• Or any other interpretation that speaks to you!

Rules

• Length: 5-40 lines
• Form: Any (free verse, formal, prose poetry - your choice)
• Submissions: Reply to this thread with your poem
• Deadline: January 31, 2026
• Limit: One poem per person

Judging

Community voting plus moderator selection. We'll pick 3 winners:

• First Place
• Runner-Up
• Honorable Mention

This is Beginner-Friendly!

Never entered a contest before? This is your sign! We welcome poets of all skill levels. What matters is authenticity and effort, not perfection.

Good luck to everyone! Can't wait to read your new beginnings.

Excited for this! Here's my submission:

January Thaw

The creek is speaking again -
after weeks of ice-locked silence,
I hear the water finding its voice,
testing the edges of frozen things.

This is how change comes:
not in earthquakes
but in the patient work of thaw,
in the drip that becomes trickle
that becomes stream
that becomes rush.

I stand on the bank
and let my own ice crack.
Whatever was frozen in me
is ready now
to run.

Hope this captures the theme! Good luck everyone.

I can't believe I'm entering a contest but here goes nothing!

After the Papers Were Signed

I bought new sheets.
It seemed important -
to sleep on something
that had never held his shape.

They were white.
I'd always wanted white but he said
white shows everything,
and maybe that was the point.

The first night I spread like a starfish,
all four corners mine,
and cried so hard
I had to wash them the next day.

But I kept them white.
And slowly, slowly,
I learned to take up all the space
I'd spent years making small.

It's about my divorce. New beginnings sometimes start with endings. Hope that fits the theme.

EmberWords, that's stunning. "Learned to take up all the space / I'd spent years making small" - absolutely beautiful. This definitely fits the theme.

Here's mine! Trying to keep it positive:

Day One

Every morning is practice
for the person I'm becoming.
Today I will drink water.
Today I will stretch toward light.

I don't need to be new -
just willing to try again.
The sun doesn't apologize
for rising.

So here I am,
one more time,
one more chance
to choose myself.

Is this too simple? I wanted something hopeful!

SunflowerPoet - "The sun doesn't apologize / for rising" is a wonderful line. Simple can be powerful! This has a clarity that feels appropriate for the theme.

Going a bit darker with my entry:

Molt

I am shedding the year like snakeskin -
all the people I pretended to be
slipping off in translucent sheets.

Underneath, I am raw and pink
and terrified of the air.
But the old skin was too tight.
I couldn't breathe in that shape anymore.

They say a snake is vulnerable after molting,
soft-scaled and slow,
hiding until the new skin hardens.

I understand now
why beginning again
means being tender for a while,
why growth feels
so much like breaking.

New beginnings aren't always pretty.

Attempting something more formal:

January Sonnet

The calendar lies blank as newfallen snow,
each square a room I haven't entered yet.
December's weight has melted, debts reset,
the future waits like seeds beneath the loam.

I make no resolutions, speak no vow -
experience has taught me to forget
the promises I've broken, the regret
of falling short of who I said I'd grow.

Instead, I simply stand here at the door
between what was and what has yet to be,
acknowledging the threshold, nothing more,

then step across as if it's just another
morning, just another chance to see
if this could be the year I find my way.

Took some liberties with the sonnet form - Petrarchan octave with a modified sestet. Hope it works!

My entry - a prose poem:

Starting Over at Thirty-Seven

The women in my family don't begin again. They stay. Through thick and thin, through fist and silence, through all the years of should have left but didn't. So when I signed the lease on my own apartment - just my name, no one else's - I felt like a traitor to generations of enduring.

But also: I felt like the first one through the wall.

The apartment is small. The walls are white and I haven't decorated yet. Every room is possibility, unfurnished. I bought a plant last week - something living, something requiring care. I'm learning to keep things alive on purpose.

Maybe that's what new beginnings are: the slow work of filling empty rooms with things you choose, of finally having space to spread out and see what shape you take when you're not cramped into someone else's life.

I water my plant. The sun comes in. I begin.

Hope prose poems are okay for this!

VelvetPen - absolutely prose poems count! And this is gorgeous. "The first one through the wall" is such a powerful reframe of breaking tradition.

Wow, the entries so far are incredible. Keep them coming, everyone!

Okay. Here's mine.

4:47 AM

This is the hour of starting over:
before the day has any shape,
before I remember
all the ways I've failed.

In darkness, I am no one yet.
I could be anyone.
The person who finally keeps the promise.
The one who gets it right.

The clock ticks toward light
and I hold this space
of pure potential -

knowing in an hour
I'll be myself again,
flawed and trying,
but for now -
just for now -
I am new.

First contest ever! Here goes:

What My Therapist Said

You don't have to become
a whole new person, she said.
You just have to water
different parts of yourself.

The parts you've been neglecting -
the ones that were too soft to survive
where you came from -
give those some sun.

I thought about this
on the bus home,
rain streaking the window,
and realized: I've been gardening
all wrong.

Pulling up flowers,
watering weeds,
calling it growth.

So here's my new year:
learn the difference.
Get my hands dirty
in the right soil.

Hope this isn't too literal lol

My contribution:

At Seventy

They say by now I should be settled,
rooted like an old oak,
done with becoming.

But this morning I woke with a poem
I'd never written before,
words I'd never thought to arrange.

New beginnings don't require youth.
They require only willingness -
the quiet courage to admit
that even after all these years,
I don't yet know
everything I'm capable of.

So I pick up my pen again,
seventy years in,
still a student,
still beginning.

A meditation on continuing to grow at any age.