Poet and Happiful Poetry Prize guest judge Richard Tyler shares a poem about making space for what we have created – and sending it into the world before certainty arrives.

Writing poetry and sharing it with the world are two very different things. In Before the Light, which you can read below, poet and psychotherapist Richard Tyler writes compassionately about that hesitation that comes with using our voice.

No stranger to the complicated feelings that arise when sharing creative work, Richard is the author of As a Kite Falls and holds the Bardic Chair for Bath. His writing explores grief, nature, transition, and what it means to be fully human. Alongside his wife, Kelly, he also runs The Willow Tree Foundation, a nature-based healing sanctuary in Wiltshire, where he brings together therapeutic practice and the restorative power of the natural world. Richard is also a Counselling Directory member.

This year, Richard joins Deborah Alma and the Happiful editorial team in judging the Happiful Poetry Prize 2027.

As the competition opens for another year, Richard's poem offers something to anyone keeping their own words folded away – the possibility that we don't have to feel ready to make the leap.

Before the Light

I am the first to sing, and I sing in the dark.

Not because the dark deserves it.
Not because I am sure of the note.
The song was always in me.
What arrived was the willingness to let it go,
and willingness, once present,
cannot be caged.

You are holding one now. I can feel it.
You have folded it small enough to keep.
You have decided it is not ready:
that the light must come first,
that others should go ahead of you,
that a truer bird will say it better.

Dear human, listen:
no bird has ever waited to be good enough.
The morning is not a competition.
The morning is a throat, opening.

I do not know who is listening.
I have never known.
I send the song out over the wet fields
the way you must send yours:
not because you are sure it will land,
but because keeping it is how it dies.

Your work is not too small.
It is not too plain.
It is not too much your own:
too much your own is the whole of its worth.

So open your hands.
Unfold what you folded small.
Let the thing you made go out
before you feel ready,
the way I do,
the way everything alive does
when it can no longer hold
what it was made to give.

Sing.
Not for the light.
Before it.

Share your poem with us

Richard’s poem is published here for inspiration rather than as an example of what we're looking for. Your poem does not need to sound like his – or like anybody else’s – to have something worth saying.

The Happiful Poetry Prize is free to enter and open to UK residents aged 18 and over, whether you have been writing for years or have never shared a poem before. We’re looking for original, previously unpublished poems of no more than 25 lines that explore mental health or wellbeing in an engaging and empowering way.

The winner will receive £100, with four shortlisted poets each receiving a £25 National Book Token. All five poems will be published in issue 120 of Happiful, and every entrant will be invited to a free online poetry webinar with Sophie Dumont.

Entries close at 11.59pm on 30 October 2026. Terms and conditions apply.

ENTER THE HAPPIFUL POETRY PRIZE 2027