"A love song to the Earth is more powerful than a sermon"

This year Rutland Friends of the Earth held a poetry competition. Earth Words was devised in order to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of Friends of the Earth. We were looking for a different and more powerful way to encourage people to think about the state of our world.

We asked everyone we could think of to write a poem about the Earth and as a result had so many poems that we couldn't fit them all in the book. Shame! We had sad poems and fun poems and poems and angry poems and little poems and long poems, poems that rhymed and poems that didn't rhyme and even one that looked more like a short story than a poem. Poems came from all over the British Isles and one even came from Spain!

Their authors' concern for our planet streamed out of the envelopes & lay all over the floor.

It was a lot of fun reading the poems but not so much fun having to choose some and not others. The judges found this extremely difficult but Gillian Clarke's message to all would-be poets is succinct: "A love-song to the earth is more powerful than a sermon. All the winning poems reflect this truth."

What the judges were looking for was that extra edge, the sting in the tale that gets you thinking. Jon Canter, novelist explained "All the entrants had their hearts in the right place but the winners had their words in the right place too. They brought talent, wit, craft and unpredictability to the cause."

Clive Anderson said of the winners: "With the exceptions of the Vogons in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, poets were usually are friends of the Earth. Certainly the poems entered for this competition were all Earth-friendly. And all good. But these, we thought, were the best."

I would like to thank the judges for their enthusiasm & co-operation in the judging of this competition. I hope you like the poems that we squeezed in and I am so sorry that there were many more that we couldn't squeeze!

How many friends the earth has! Thank goodness for that. But it needs more, and more active ones.

You can watch the Earth Words awards ceremony online with Clive and Jon, complete with live readings of the winning entries, Friends of the Earth's Conference.

The winners were:

Young Poets category

• 1st - Bonnie-Ruth Samuyiwa
• 2nd - Penny Skipper
• 3rd - Will Alexander

Adults

• 1st - Emily Hinshelwood
• 2nd - Linda France
• 3rd - Paul Walker

Gabrielle Maughan, Rutland Friends of the Earth