"There were some very fine poems here
and I found it exceptionally hard to reach any final (though still very
tentative-feeling) decision.
Congratulations everyone and long may the
competition continue!"
Professor CCNorris
Joint First Prize
Pregnancy: Boy Child, A Sestina
This is a really
resourceful, technically inventive and impressively well-sustained example of
work in a difficult and challenging verse-form. Despite the high level of
formal complexity and technical expertise it manages to convey a deep sense of
conflicting emotions and ambivalent feelings. The sestina form can sometimes
produce a sense of almost wearisome monotony - what William Empson called an
impression of 'beating forever upon the same door in vain', here writing about
Sir Philip Sidney, one of its greatest exponents - but this example is
skilfully varied throughout and really holds the reader's interest.
Professor C C Norris |
Pregnancy: Boy Child, A Sestina
Heather Fowler
When you first imagine you having a child,
you picture him
perfect, upside down, hanging
from playground bars or clenching a ribbed
seashell
at warm beaches; you picture warning him not to slip
and
fall on wet tiles and yourself retrieving countless damp towels left
in
community-center pool lockers, inside plastic baggies, inside
locker
rooms that smell and taste like bleach, or the inside
of stagnant bottles
or the bottoms of feet. This child,
you think, will be loved, will never
be lonely or left,
will never go hungry, and never be hanging
with
tough kids on bad corners. He'll slip
the shell of success like a born
diver, break the shell
of his birth class like a poker to glass
ceilings, and you'll shell
out so much dough to make this real, your
selfish, inside
self will wonder how, for someone so small, you let slip
your need for cosmetics, desirability, and sterling--how the child
himself could become a lone compulsive thought, swimming in utero, hanging
would-be dreams from your mental windows like banners or ads left
atop every bureau and stage, like delicate heirlooms left
in groping palms
that hold the idea of him like walnut shells
hold clenched meats: hidden,
under wraps--while you busy yourself hanging,
your thoughts of his future
like tapestries or beatific still-lifes inside
the only vacant room in
your head, which is your own future--hoping this child
will live to your
ideals, reflecting as he kicks and you stand in your slip
in the
bathroom, huge-bellied and bulging, that the same slip
stretched up around
nude thighs, exposing and hiked on the left
must tickle the place where
his head pushes into your side, that this child
you have yet to bear, with
your abdomen thin yet strong as a grape-skin shell,
can feel you just as
you feel him, but will only be inside
you a while longer, the cord between
soon hanging
in cool air, where placenta and afterbirth will follow,
hanging
until cut, when your nipples will become the piece of you to slip
into his mouth to preserve the bond, to fight the feeling inside
that, alone, bereft in stretched skin and bones, you have been left
or
abandoned like a hermit crabs out-moded house, a forlorn shell
vacated
with his growth--but the child, you recall with relief, the child
is
not yet out, is now just a hanging star of possibility on the crib mobile's
left
horizon, a being in your body who has yet to slip the wombs hot
shell--
a mystery inside you, awaiting: this saint, this progeny, this
long dream, your child.
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Joint First Prize
HOPE
Another exercise in formal ingenuity but (again)
much more than that - the contrast in structure between the two stanzas (both
sonnets, one relatively strict in rhyme-scheme and verse-form, the other much
looser) exactly mirrors the contrast in feeling, from intently focused to rich
& diffuse. Some influence of Elizabeth Bishop, I think, but none the worse
for that.
Professor C C Norris |
Hope
Biljana Scott
1.
Beaked
birds flying above the papyrus
of my tablecloth approximate flight
only
in our minds: what seems to us
so quaintly authentic, this
life-like
(haven’t you seen it all in Egypt then?)
scene of local
flora, fauna, light
is – face it – just colour stamped on
cotton,
cheap at that, nowhere near convincing.
What of this small
bird, darting up the stem
of my wine glass, mirror imaged, seeking
like an unleashed alter-ego to escape
and soar on spirit thermals. Will it
take wing?
Shall I fly too? Yes! Here’s to hope! – ah, too
late:
I toast. It falls. Pigment beside my plate.
2.
The
minutes counting out each hour
swell with the weight of what’s still
to be done
and expand time’s contour, demands
pending like the
sweep and curve of pregnancy.
Late afternoon in Sidi Bou Said
and
there are no hours here, only shadows
stretching feline over white walls,
desires
tracing the whorls and lances that St Louis,
patron saint,
forged with his Berber princess
in this village touched by the boundless
blue
of hope. Some still claim that hope’s but desire
or demand
yoked to impotence: futile.
Hope? The silent surge of fecund
shadows
from wrought hours and iron caged windows.
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| Commended |
Cowslips
Sue Percival
They are rare
now;
little slips of yellow which set a bank alive
reminding me of
sunny days,
of childish dreams and later, childlike hopes.
Their rarity
makes them special to me now,
where once they were commonplace,
small
and overlooked,
like careless words tossed to the wind.
Your words
are measured, aimed like sharpened, pointed darts,
designed to tease and
cover deeper feelings.
They do not fool me,
for they cannot fool the
one who sees into your soul.
Patient, still and calm, I have
waited,
for words as rare as yellow slips upon a shady bank.
They come
when least expected and
the waiting makes them special to me now,
not
commonplace, nor overlooked.
I hold them to me, little slips of words
that others toss so carelessly to the wind.
I will hold them always, as I
wait.
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Tea Party
Joyce Weil
she laid out
a life's tray of complaints
deckle-edged napkins
enfolding
annoyances,
small china coffee cups
patterned with rage,
large tea
cups and saucers
flowered with malice,
the sugar cubes
crackled
with grudges
she had held forever
she wanted,
expected
her
life to be
a gay tea party
and could not understand
why it never
happened
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Pony Express Love
David Woodruff
She
would not falter nor strum the gate
Waiting for her pony express rider
To return when prairie winds blew colder
Or the cool sky an even shade of
slate
She would carry the cross of time, the arm of fate.
This cowpoke
in spurs her only true lover
Galloping down dusty trails of an Indian
summer
And not the wind’s song that would arrive late
Could stop
that single mail from arriving,
That she would run to the door, rise on tip
toe
Greet him with breast swelling, arms embracing
Walk down to the
creek, listen to the water’s flow,
Make up for time lost in dreaming
and waiting
Their silhouettes melded against evening‘s red
glow.
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What You Left Behind
David Woodruff
Of all the things you left behind:
your sunset-smile behind Tiffany glass
doors
the images: hair falling into the sink
once the color, the
consistency of chestnut honey,
the shriek of your little nieces
playing
with plastic tea sets,
"Do you know where tea comes from?" you'd ask them.
China.
India. Nowhere, really.
They stared at you, numb,
the way
your tongue grew silent as a flower,
that garden of yellow acacia
you
wanted to plant last spring
could speak volumes above the sweep
of fir
trees in the distance.
And after everything auctioned off,
the
house for sale, sisters, uncles,
great-aunts, arguing over the will's
provisions
but somewhere above,
blowing around the world
a blank
piece of paper,
something you left for all of us
to see but with its
invisible text
the signature of acacia
the inner voice committed to
white space
only for me to read
your most trusted
gardener.
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| Best poem by a Local Author |
I
owned a Bird with an Ugly Voice
Scharlie Meeuws
I owned a
bird with an ugly voice
whose song crackled the peace
I had him
barred in a cage outside
till he learnt some tunes.
I wanted his
melodies,
so I trained him on little tasks.
singing him all the
songs I knew.
At first standing near his cage,
I heard him croak like
a frog,
muttering, spitting out his seeds.
then I reached him
some lettuce,
made him honey with peppermint tea
for his throat. He
kept silent.
I schooled him in music,
played him Chopin and
Mozart,
a hard apprenticeship in learning to listen.
He flopped on his
perch, wing-flapping.
He opened his beak letting out sounds
mingled
with the patter of raindrops,
the rush and the hush of the wind
creating his own melodies out of tune.
One night, after a long
silence, the final test:
I leant out of my bedroom window.
A full
moon. And then when it happened,
first a secretive sound, low in notes,
swelling into a crescendo, higher and higher.
I stood motionless,
struck with desire.
I hardly slept. In the morning I put up
the sign:
Nightingale for Hire.
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| Jim Horton Prize for a Local Poem |
In
the beginning there was. . . . . GRASS ! ! ! !
Harry G
Mitchell
Of all the tedious garden tasks grass cutting is the
worst.
Man has always hated it….and Adam was the first.
I
can’t be sure what happened...I wasn’t on the scene.
But unless
you know better here’s what might have been.
After Eve gave Man the
apple saying "Here Mate..Take a bite"
Adam said he wouldn't…. but then
he said he might.
He took a little nibble then ate it.. pips as well.
He knew he was in trouble when he heard God start to yell.
God said " Now
you're for it you silly pair of fools,
I let you live in Eden but I gave
you certain rules.
You had your choice of all the fruit. There's a hundred
here to see.
But the apple was excluded for I'd grown it just for me.
Now you must leave my garden that's all I have to say.
So grab a fig leaf
both of you and then be on your way."
Well, Eve was very tearful but Adam
couldn't wait.
He almost burst out singing as he slammed the Golden
Gate.
And Eve said "What's got in to you ? You're acting like an ass"
But Adam said "It's not all bad. Now God must cut the grass."
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| Special Prize |
In
the moonlight
Zoe Dowell (aged 10)
Rabbits dodge
the moonlight rays
Trying to find scraps of hay
Ducks paddle in a
gleaming river
Giving off a silent shiver
A dragon fly's wings
glitter
Resting on a bed of litter
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| Poem polling most votes |
In
Reply to a Message from Barbara
Evan Guilford-Blake
Nor
have I yet forgotten you;
Nor, love, shall I ever:
Even autumn's dying
leaves
Hear echoes of September.
Nor have I yet forsaken you;
Nor spurned my desire:
Even ashes left to chill
Feel shadows of the
fire.
Nor have I yet forgiven you;
Nor yet reread your letters:
The first sweet tastes of fine liqueur
Cloud after-tastes of
bitters...
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