Here are the top three entries as chosen by judge Fiona Theokritoff.
First Place
Thoughts of O’Hara in Wet Weather by Lesley Burt of Christchurch
So the rain falls – while I
wander among suburban shops,
press avocados
to check ripeness
inhale scents of baking –
ponder a notion that raindrops
rolling down everyone’s umbrellas
once soared with seabirds and –
some time in their cycle –
surfed Hawaii, sailed the Med
and witnessed black kite Isis
gathering up pieces of Osiris.
Then – homewards
across Iford bridge –
drips make rippled rings
in the river and a grey heron
peers into deep water
while its statue stillness
blends with the downpour.
I think of him – see this rain is Hudson
and Wailuku, Nile, Stour.
Second Place
The Death of the Exile by Anne McDonough
Home is farthest away
in the anticyclonic gloom
of a midwinter day.
On nights so long and cold
the fear you will never return
weighs on you thousandfold.
All the years expended
forgetting, remembering, writing it down,
lonely comprehended.
Your adopted country
beginning to look more and more
like the old enemy.
One January morn
clarity rises with the sun:
it’s too much to be borne.
Someday, somewhere, somehow.
No more staring down that tunnel.
You are going home now.
Third Place
Now You Are Old by Louise Wilford of Barnsley
Now you are old, he can see the vacant
hollow in your mind, where chemicals
once leapt across synapses, each thought
an electric eagerness. But now,
though an agitated restlessness still
shambles through your senses, the world
cannot stick in that lost space.
Act, respond, remember – all washed up
like froth on listless waves.
You can’t recall the siren pain that
brought you here, imprisoned you in A & E
for eighteen hours, laid you on an unfamiliar
bed, inside the empty tangle of an
unknown room. ‘I didn’t know I had Covis,’
you say, voice faltering with surprise
on the mobile phone. ‘It’s Covid, Mum,
and it’s me who has it. You have gall-stones.
Don’t you remember?’
But the events of two nights ago
are lost in the abandoned streets
of that derelict place, cracked
webby windowpanes, the bones
of dusty rooms and doorways
like open mouths in roofless buildings.
Untethered notions drift and fall,
make random links before they lose their hold
and float off, rudderless.
He perseveres, picks at the knot
of your mind till your thoughts unspool,
a grappling hook caught on an outcrop
of memory, but always there’s the sudden
collapse into broken threads,
deformity of misaligned ideas that shape
your baffling world – the absent place
where dreams no longer pounce and pace,
now you are old.
Highly Commended local poet
The Persistent Presence of Absence by Julie Bardill
I wear your absence like a coat
Collar pulled up to my chin. Wrap myself in
Unexpected weight without warmth.
I acknowledge your absence with childlike reluctance
Something I did not want, or ask for
Too exhausted to kick up a fuss.
I touch your absence like fragile crystal
Desperate not to crack the delicate glass
Yet its shards have already cut me.
I carry your absence like a sack of swag, full of
stolen treasures that were never meant to be mine
Heavier than my guilt.
I trudge forward with your absence at my side
A shadow stalker
Sucking me into its all-consuming nothingness.
I cast out your absence with every breath
Loss and pain, wrestling
It takes every ounce of me to fail.
I deny your absence
Pushing on slowly into a new darkness
Never quite alone…
For I still wear your absence like a coat
‘A Garment for All Occasions’ written on the label.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks again to all those who entered.
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