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A New Leaf for the Looking Glass 2026/27

Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
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Winning poem: 'Elegy for the poet boy'


Note: The following poem written my Malek Owera L6 (20oweram@students.watfordboys.org) placed in the top 13 out of 1400+ entries in the Tower Poetry Competition, run by Christ Church, Oxford University.

.Hama, Syria 

 From youth, he has a thunderous appetite for the classics: al-Mutanabbi, al-Ma’arri, Abu Nuwas, ibn Shaddad,  ‘We are a people who know no middle ground; for us, it is either the ultimate honour or the grave’ –  al-Hamdani’s truest words rain on him like a charm a plague of hail.  The boy absorbs the aural beauty of Friday’s athan – eventually remembering this compels him to go and pray.  He navigates fearful streets of expired concrete, Eternal Leader’s smile beating down on every block, Scorns the masjid’s surveillant, armed to the teeth with pen and paper. The list of names looks longer than last week.  The child savours every utterance of every prayer, the pinnacle of this ancient language. Divine poetry. After, chatterings and rumours escape restless mouths. Stormy proclamations about freedom and the Ikhwan.

 He is an apprentice of the Golden Age poets, so he knows the potential of words: To inspire, to create, to speak  The truth.  

 If the murmurs are true – if the uprising is coming – he knows what he is to do. To follow in that ancient discipline and  become a rhetorical combatant – glory! 

February 3, 1982 

“Take up arms for God! Syria! Truth! Or to the grave!” All chant his words, dazzling and rousing and sun-drenched.  they know the stakes


February 23, 1982



structures falling, streets shivering in the scent of metal and smoke, the city’s people boiling away in icy February winds; 

the country, watching and hearing, learns to whisper about the events; outwardly, they 

 Deflect, and simulate a conversation about the weather, instead.


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