Open Category

(Jump straight to: Short Category, Local Poem)

Ist: Matt Merritt (Whitwick, Leics.)

2nd: Jo Arnold (Eggesford, Devon)

It's Late

In the fourth year of her age, at the kitchen table

in springtime, we were talking

about grandmothers. I said, no, you never knew mine, she died

before you were even born. She said, died?

Something stopped. The silence turned

hard edged. The moment crystallised, shocking

the woodgrain into focus off the table. Died?

Do people die? Like flowers? And she gave me the straight look

she was born with; then the garden,

her furious blue gaze raking

the daffodils and the grass that bent

to the cutting wind. I said, yes,

casual as I could. Yes, sooner or later

people get old, they get tired, they stop walking

and lie down to rest and when they're ready,

then they die. Like that? She said, looking at me again.

She looks at the garden through this new lens she has been given.

She thinks she will go out and pick a flower before it dies.

She looks at her mother at the kitchen table and sees

her grandmother and the grandmother before that

standing in the corridor of time before she was even born,

waiting for her.

In the fourth year of her age, she stood by the kitchen table,

scowling at the daffodils and looking

like trouble. Come on, I said, it's getting late.

Let's go out and pick some of those flowers before bedtime.

White Wife

(There is a she-ghost on the island of Unst, the Shetlands, who appears in cars driven by single men)

I was sober

going for my usual nowhere,

northwards, to the old ends of the Earth,

both headlights taking the piss, sleet clonking

the windscreen, like filling a glass.

Another kennel of a night with the black dog

stinking things rotten and biting my head off,

(I swear he won't, but he does).

She was on the road, leaning hard

into that dark, tugging the car to her,

hand over hand along the light beam,

but quick as you like, she was inside,

the boozy talk of Unst fixing her

as White Wife, then taking a front seat.

(I have to laugh now at the 'wife' tag'

how it works both ways, leaving her easy

but with my ring on her finger). By Christ,

that face was white, white as a pillowcase.

She looked up at me and yawned, maybe

from pleasure, as her lips then blew a kiss.

The breath reeked: it was of more rottenness,

of barley, mouldy from the Flood, of charred

long dead yeast. But the intimacy

in the shape of her mouth held me:

I remembered an evening dance,

fiddle on my shoulder, staring down

the 'f' hole, the bow quick shovelling

the rosin smell that was a soothing balk.

Folk stopped to listen as a tale

turned on its head; she could never sing

but tempted and temptress did the music,

hers and my tune slowly pushed the boats out,

on a better night than this one,

set men dancing on a silvery voe.

Short Category

Shadow Bones

Last year there was a skeleton on the path.

A rabbit. Teeth intact. Some remaining skin.

Each day I watched its gentle subsidence,

the tiny returning steps to earlier dust.

Each night its fragile luminescence

faded a little under the grey-green light.

This year there’s no sign of those glimmering bones,

no perceptible greening of that spot,

just the outline of my knowledge imprinted in the earth

like the shadow of a shadow beneath the grass.

untitled haiku

the next day, after light rain,

there on the stone step

I found your other wing

Judge's comments

Mnemosyne

Moon-sallow

silver-eyed sister

swathed in a drift

of blue—

hour-sifter

uneasy sleeper

arrow-maker, lookout:

ember-keeper.

Judge's comments

3rd: Jane Evans (Ware, Herts.)

The Palace at 4 a.m.

Often at this hour dreams come thick and fast.

Long narratives between the first and last

Chime of the clock, unfold and gallop past

Prodigious, prodigal—reined in, they fade

To a clutch of threads, a half-remembered place,

A path, predicament, sensation, trace

Leaving the heart in grief for chances glimpsed

But turned away from, high adventures missed,

Prospects disowned, a richer life unlived.

Judge's comments

Edna Eglinton (North Tawton)

Captured

Some moments by their strength escape

from time, crystallise in amber, hang

forever framed in starlight.

I lean against you in a jolting bus,

your fingers on my arm forever

reassuring, forever telling me

that everything is just beginning.