Winners of the Valentine's Verse Challenge selected! | Ambient

Can we have a drum roll please….

We are delighted to announce the winners of the ‘Valentine’s Verse Challenge’ as selected by our very own cupid, Chair of the Board – David Brindle!

❤️ Congratulations go out to Ann. C at Peppercorn House, Nadia Halliday of our Creative Arts Project Credo, and Ellen Hayes at Felsted Road! ❤️ Read their wonderful poems below.

Read poem by Ellen

The year we searched for love

We thought we might not be able to find it

That if we searched it might not be there

We wondered if love would be absent,

If maybe we had forgotten how to care.

We were scared and fearful, often we felt so very alone,

Our favourite places where we worked which for most of used to feel like home.

They no longer gave us comfort, on the long days that were so much of the same

Society seemed broken in so many hard to fix ways.

Cuddles given so freely by those who didn’t understand the rules,

Smiles in twinkly older eyes that showed life could be beautiful after all,

Colleagues standing shoulder to shoulder, families waiting at home,

There was so much more love than the world had ever known.

A touch of the hand reminds one that we are all still very much here,

The soft caress of a loved one, as they whisper in your ear.

A coffee shared with a colleague, a cry on the phone to your mum,

Zoom calls in abundance, to your friends, your work, your nan.

Visiting our neighbours, communities helping out as one.

The ones we look after, the same way as we hold our children near,

Our unique way of working that somehow dispels our fears.

We thought we couldn’t find it, we thought the love had gone away,

In truth, we found so much of it, so much more love along the way.

Read poem by Ann

Read poem by Nadia

David gave us some really heartfelt insights as to why he chose these three poems, saying:

“Romance clearly takes many forms in the Ambient family, some quite surprising. In a bumper crop of verses to Valentines present, past and longed-for, we had oceans of love, red roses – of course – laughter and tears, but also jelly babies, lockdown Netflix nights and even a Spitfire aircraft. We had sentimental ballads, clever haikus and witty rhymes, including one rather direct appeal to a boyfriend to come up with (in the writer’s view) a long overdue ring. Mark, you know who you are!

Well done to everyone for throwing themselves into the spirit of the competition. It’s really difficult to pick three winners, but by a very close head they are:

Ann C, of Peppercorn House, who submitted two poems, one yearning for a long-lost love (a bit of a theme with several of our bards) but the other, which lands her a prize, to the coronavirus vaccine – “you truly will be my salvation”.

Nadia Halliday, of the Creative Arts Project, which yielded a bunch of excellent entries, for her ingenious Ode to a French Curve – for the uninitiated, a French curve is a template used by designers and artists to draw beautiful curves. “O curvaceous thing!” Nadia addresses this most unlikely object of her affections.

And Ellen Hayes, team leader at Felsted Road, who submitted a beautiful, topical piece about how love has triumphed despite everything these past 12 months in how we work at Ambient. “We thought we couldn’t find it, we thought the love had gone away,” Ellen writes. “In truth, we found so much of it, so much more love along the way.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that sums up perfectly how we have all felt this most unusual of Valentine Days.”

Thank you to everyone that took part – you stole a piece of our hearts with your romantic prose!

Find and follow Ambient Support on Facebook

#AmbientSharesTheLove #TheAmbientWay #CreativeWritingForMentalHealth