Sarah Frost
WONDER-EYED
One of the things we love most about children is their ability to experience profound astonishment at everything that surrounds them. But how can we nourish and sustain this ability as we grow older?
No one has pondered this question more deeply than Sarah Frost, who won the English category of the AVBOB Poetry Competition in 2025. As we prepare to celebrate International Youth Day, The AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates her voice and work. Her second collection, River Fugue (Karavan Press, 2025) includes hauntingly beautiful poems about the ways in which wonder can be discovered, lost and found again. In one poem, she remembers discovering the beauty of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ on a lonely evening, while she was hungry for love as well as experience. Another finds her, eight years old and at a loss for words, wandering alone through a winter landscape just after she has received her first hardcover book.
“As a child I didn’t have words for the big feelings,” she confirms. “So it is a gift to be able to go back to that time as an adult, through memory and poetry, and reckon with what happened to me. I was so lonely and cold the night I read the Keats poem, love-hungry, and realising that poetry could ‘warm and feed’ me was an important insight. Through these experiences, I was slowly realising how I could make my mark, plot a path through grief, with words.”
Another exquisite poem, ‘St Barts’, laments the loss of her own childlike ability for wonder. She describes how she used to walk through the door of a church and feel herself in the presence of something larger than herself: “These days the wooden door is barred shut. / And, I have lost those eyes ablaze with wonder.”
Although this poem expresses profound loss, the entire collection shows how this blaze of wonder can be rekindled throughout one’s adult life. ‘Child in the Scarp Forest’, for instance, shows her beginning to learn how to see through a child’s eyes again:
I see with her cerulean gaze
the new scarp growing from the old,
the wild fig as it breaks and frays,
the flowering understory, crimson gold.
Like a blue duiker, wonder-eyed,
from the rot of what has died,
she finds the fruit and its seeded core.
Great trees mute the urban roar.
What does celebrating International Youth Day mean to her as a poet?
“Young people need to trust their voices and use them. I wish I’d had more faith in my skills and insights sooner. International Youth Day says to young people that they are part of the conversation, something really important in these alienated times where tech pulls us away from our experience, and master narratives (war, capitalism, ecocide) terrify us into silence.”
What other activities help her to stay creative and grounded on a daily basis?
“I am a dedicated Iyengar yoga practitioner – practising at least twice a week, sometimes more. Coming back to the wisdom of the body is very important, especially because I lead a cerebral (and too often online) life. I am a fervent believer in the importance of self-compassion. As an artist, it helps me find the ‘still voice within’, and summon meaning from an expansive and generous centre, rather than one that is shut down and self-doubting.”
In the next few days, write a poem in which you draw wonder and strength from something ordinary but precious in your immediate environment.
The AVBOB Poetry Competition is open for submissions until 30 November 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and learn how to enter your best words.