Don’t Hesitate! – AVBOB Poetry Mini-Competition winners
The AVBOB Poetry Project’s second mini-competition of 2026 welcomed many fine submissions from poets around the country in response to the call “Don’t hesitate!”. Poets engaged enthusiastically, presenting poems that showed awareness of the potency and sensitivity to the potential inherent in a moment in time. The mini-competition received a number of inspired and beautiful entries.
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First-prize winner: Gillian Rennie
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Second-prize winner: Collen Molahlehi
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Third-prize winner: Sihle Madikane
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The winning poems speak with clarity and emotional precision, revealing how the most unassuming moments can hold profound and heart-warming human truth. Mini-competition judge, Liesl Jobson, notes that many entries share a quiet and determined turning towards the things that matter – encounters that endure.
“Across all submissions, there was a palpable shift away from anxiety and overwhelm towards moments of care, touch and connection. The poems remind us that even in difficult times, meaning is often carried in the smallest, most ordinary gestures.”
Liesl believes that the top writers are investing time in their creative practice and reading widely.
First-place winner Gillian Rennie from Port Alfred is reinventing herself after a lifetime as an academic. A recently completed PhD in Creative Non-Fiction at the University of the Western Cape has helped her to refocus on poetry. She placed second in both the 2021 McGregor Poetry Award and the 2020 Magdala Award. She says, “On the grounds that reading is a writer’s primary guide, I have always been a reader – what the grown-ups always called ‘a voracious reader’. Certainly, I remain a curious reader. Some of that energy arrives now in my poetry.”
Liesl, excited about the winning poem, adds, “Gillian’s poem is an exquisite chant-like response to the original by Mary Oliver. The internal rhyme and repetition build a rhythm that is simple, disciplined and powerfully elegant. She has created a wonderful interpretation of the theme that invites the reader to be present and to behold wonder.”
This day this day this
day is rare as any
any day any day all
the days always
a gift: each one
a chance: another one
a lift: a look and a life
what is required is to make it more than a day
stand in it as on a flagstone paving a way
through the thicket
across the wasteland
into the only ocean we are called to swim in
~ Gillian Rennie
Second-place winner Collen Molahleli is a final-year Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Johannesburg. He won first prize in the 2025 AVBOB Poetry Mini Competition “That Still, Small Voice” and placed third in the 2024 AVBOB Poetry Mini Competition “Three Ways to Look at Someone”. His debut poetry collection Beyond The Mask was published in 2025.
The theme of this mini competition encouraged Collen to closely inspect the quiet acts of courage that shape daily life. “Taxi Queue was inspired by an elderly woman at a taxi rank. The poem itself reflects the resilience needed to keep moving even when everything around you seems to fall apart,” he notes.
Taxi Queue
I saw an old woman, uGogo,
standing in a taxi queue
with two grocery bags.
Three times
the queue moved.
Three times
she bent to lift her bags.
Not once
did she ask for help.
One bag split open.
Oranges rolled across the concrete
and a packet of maize meal
fell hard enough
to spread white dust around her feet.
I watched her kneel,
not to cry,
but to gather up
the oranges
one by one.
Carefully, as if she was collecting
pieces of herself.
Something inside me gave way.
All those years
I had been looking for courage
in the wrong places
when all along
it looked like this:
an old woman
on cold concrete
picking up what life had dropped
and carrying on.
~ Collen Molahleli
Third-place winner, Sihle Madikane, aged 19, comes from Ngqamakhwe in the Eastern Cape. She is a second-year student at the University of the Free State and currently lives in Bloemfontein. “Reading has always been part of my life,” says Sihle, “and my writing grew from that. I started writing pieces I could share publicly at the age of 16 but until now wasn’t brave enough to enter a competition. The call to enter this mini-competition helped my courage to stand on both feet.”
Writing ‘Belonging Again’ helped her create a better state of mind after a difficult relationship. She shares, “I can now imagine a healed version of myself that can love again without calculating a way out.”
Belonging Again
I didn’t grow into it this time, this feeling.
It emerged from the cracks of my heart.
Like a plant finally finding sunlight,
its roots knitting it into an absolute.
I was that sunlight, lighting up my heart into life.
It could’ve been God’s divinity, a miracle.
But I settled into nostalgic belonging.
I found myself everywhere, again.
Before,
In my world, the clock’s hands
were not always in sync with time.
They held me back, moving in circles.
My heart didn’t remember itself whole
but at times it mistook a laugh for a bandage.
Times I didn’t carry it on my wrists,
Instead I imprisoned it in my chest, guarded.
When being loved meant being known.
A very unfair trade, I used to believe.
Now,
My heart is a flower bed,
housing a fertile wound.
Every Blossom is a testament
that I am learning to touch the soil.
~ Sihle Madikane
Alongside these three winning poets, Liesl congratulates strong entries from Stef de Koker, Crystal Warren, Simphiwe Mpho Zondani, Lesego Mphelo and Mark Els. She urges poets to expand their reading habits in order to learn how poems work.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition opens on 1 August 2026 and offers a cash prize of R10 000 in each language category. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za for details on how to participate.
