Deadly Hat Brah

A hill covered in blood
Flat as frozen concrete
Its button is white cotton
Headpiece as red as the kangaroo
The suns worst enemy
defeating it all day long
My shield that reflects the sun
Tastes like Christmas in my mind
Brim's as white as a piece of paper
I love it with all my smiles
The smiles that reflect the sun
It’s like Christmas from my mum

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This poem was highly commended for Poetry Object 2015

Judge's Notes:
"This poem is built of paradoxes, sudden shifts, and mesmerising synaesthesia. If it is on one hand angular and strikingly original, it is also alive with feeling. This poem shows how it is sometimes possible to use a sequence of images to suggest a whole landscape, a whole way of seeing. The scale of these images is bigger than the hat which they describe: ‘A hill covered in blood’, for instance, or a ‘Headpiece as red as the kangaroo’. This poem is a new experience: its images replace each other the way events do in dreams, easily and strangely. The ending is artfully done, as the last two lines take up the words ‘smiles’ and ‘sun’ and ‘Christmas’ from earlier in the poem, and bring them together in a suddenly tender image."
~Lisa Gorton, Poetry Object Judge 2015