Isabella Mori, Canada's National Honour, September 2026
Isabella Mori wrote the highest-scoring poem from Canada in the Writory International Poetry Contest, September 2026: New Eyes, 2097, scored 79 out of 100 by the blind judging panel across five published criteria. The poem was read in English (Latin script).
New Eyes, 2097
Your kind is writing more about me now. There’s even moving images, what you call videos. Me, hanging from a tree. Me, etched onto a rock. Me, making you think I’m moss. What you haven’t figured out yet is that it is an us-we and in the end it’s one big me. Even if you did, you wouldn’t believe it. I, lichen, am everywhere. The filaments that connect the reindeer moss with the witches’ hair and every other lichen – fruticose, foliose, crustose, squamulose, leprose, gelatinous, filamentous and all the other ones you haven’t found yet – are very thin. Hawk eyes will soon be able to spot them. Human eyes that can see them are still in development; I hear (well … ‘hear’… I know. We sense. Perceive.) they should be coming online, in 2097. Yes, some of our lichen have specialized in counting your years, others in your language, using words like like I-we-me. Taken a shining to you little bipedal fools, so proud of the squishy mass in that odd hairy dewdrop on top of your torso, sun knows why. Oh well, organisms, they come and go. I’ve been around for millions of your years. Dying is not something I do, I leave that up to pigeons and banyan trees and well, you-all. By the way, I grow between pigeon toes. On concrete. Along storm drains. I, that is we. Algae, bacteria, fungi, yeast and more that you don’t even know yet. We, that is I.
Every country's leading poet each month is named on the September 2026 National Honours. The contest is open to poets in Canada and everywhere else: enter the current round, and every poem receives a score out of 100 and a certificate.