Coffee House Poetry

Prize-Winning Poems 2007-2009

Some 2009 prizewinners at Troubadour Prize Night (l to r): Pam Zinnemann-Hope, Tom Lowenstein (2nd), Martin Haslam, Sandra Greaves, David Gilbert (Joint 3rd), Pat Borthwick, Tinker Mather, Robert Saxton, Sue Rose (1st), Barry Taylor, Maura Dooley & Jamie McKendrick (judges), Miriam Obrey & Michael McKimm.

Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2009

(see below for 2008, 2007 prizewinners, see prizes page for judges/submission-rules for the fourth annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2010.

The following prizewinning poems were chosen by judges, Maura Dooley and Jamie McKendrick, who read along with the prizewinning poets at our annual prizegiving event at the Troubadour on Monday 30th November 2009:

• First Prize, £1000: Mahler 9, Sue Rose
• Second Prize, £500: Eating Soup by the River, Tom Lowenstein
• Joint Third Prize, £125: Weeding My Sister, Carlotta Miller Johnston
• Joint Third Prize, £125: The Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus, David Gilbert

plus, with prizes of £20 each:

• Mutton Fat Jade, Edward Ragg
• Captains and the Kings, James Dufficy
• At Harefield Manor, Christopher North
• The Allegheny Hackle, Martin Haslam
• Three Deer, Michael McKimm
• The Atomic Swerve, Barry Taylor
• Valise, Tinker Mather
• In Fen Light, Pat Borthwick
• Sea Walker, Robert Saxton
• Night Shift at the Trifle Factory, Clare Kirwan
• The Missing, Kim Moore
• Prospect, Jane Draycott
• The Price of Chocolate, Noel Williams
• Property, Nina Boyd
• This is a Confessional Poem, Kathryn Maris
• The Musicologist and The Birdwatcher, Pam Zinnemann-Hope
• North, Sandra Greaves
• Fallujah Birthdays, David Atkinson
• All Souls Day 2008, Miriam Obrey

Prizewinning Poems 2009

Mahler 9

Looking beyond the contrabassoon, timps, strings,
I see you suddenly in the second row, chin supported
by your thumb, index admonishing your cheek,
crook of your third finger beneath your nose
and I can almost feel your hot dry clasp.
You can’t be here, of course, listening
to these shining violins sawing farewell,
you whom we keep as ash and celluloid
in high rooms, but my eyes would have you there,
shock of white hair, bushy brows, eyes pained
by this modern noise; the solo flute struggles
against the loud, white wind of the conductor’s work,
the man in the second row moves his hand,
and his mouth is a stranger as the music tips
into its climax and the bass clarinet lows
beneath the brass, saying we all carry our dead
with us on a quest for new homes, the klezmer dance
in our head propelling us forward, the fiddle pulling us back.

Sue Rose

Eating Soup by the River

In many gloomy soups (the nature of whose deepest being’s difficult
to accurately fathom) miscellanies swarm, that softly, intimately,

inextricably devolve from cloudy stews of ubon, ramen or of soba noodles.
The strands are hard to disentangle – as in Virgil’s long phrase at the start

of his Book VI: inextricabilis error— except that in this soup bowl appears
no mis-adventure, because gradually the entities-intended grow, as if

tadpoles had shown them, and albeit still unstable, achieve transmutation:
some little ones of these are black scab-caps of a small dried mushroom,

a hank, also black, of the Ocean Goddess’ hair-piece and at last,
curled like slender ribbons of a Nereid’s gristle — all those pink-

eared little water witches have them — swarm two brace of crustaceans,
in half-shell, all but broken and yet mutually embracing: their little

brittle feet as though in concupiscence linked in Liebestod and still
intermingled crisply. This soup, once disturbed, is disconcerting in its

counterpoint of content and the counter-action of its currents. The river,
underneath the balcony where people eat it, deepens to receive its leavings.

Tom Lowenstein

Weeding My Sister

In all her crevices
things root;

between shoulder-blades,
breasts, toes,
inside her ears.

Her body is extravagant;

ladytress, wake robin,
eyebright, rosy twisty-stalk,
forget-me not.

All the flying seeds
find room.

“Go away,” she spat
when I came close to snip.

She remains
a crowded, colourful field.

Carlotta Miller Johnston

The Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus

These days, the Preferred Place of Care
(or PPC) according to academics
is The Home or The Hospice.

Dad prefers to ignore
the finality of words
and officiates from Bed 6 on Ward 11E

summoning us
with parting gifts
as we gather

in comfy chairs provided
by the Project Coordinator for the Patient Pathway (or Matron)
and Betty, the cleaner.

He doesn’t want to go home.
He refuses the sweetened pleas of bed managers
to go home. This is home.

Contained by the, at last, certainty
of the rhythmic swish of the morphine pump
and ward rounds.

He swears the profile of a golden lioness
rises glowering from the trees
overlooking The Heath

and the paths where we handfed
Nuthatches, Chaffinches and Robins.
Fewer of them now.

He is more tired today.
I feed him slow spoonfuls
of leek and potato soup

tell him that Samuel
went to the zoo yesterday
held out his hand to touch

the Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus
almost wiped out by civil war.
That Adam wants to bring it home.

David Gilbert

Mutton Fat Jade

I
Deep-quarried in the mountains of Kunlun,
Chunked, chipped, polished, then polished again.

Seed nephrite sown in the mind of its artificer
As one cream-toned stone like raw mutton fat.

II
Uygur men and women turn spits of roast lamb
Or coax chump-chop cubes on to sticks of kaorou.
Sweet lipids drip from the polisher’s hands.

III
Hundreds of miles east, display-cases station
Dynasties. I touch the glass and, in my palm,
Seem to hold the shape of a hand in jade.

This pair of quail, palm-proportioned, more quail
By nephrite than the taxidermist’s dream,
Are hands too, yet birds, cuppable, to hold again.

IV
Outside the leaves of the ginkgo are scallop-shell
Sorrel, each leaf a scallop to seed, off-white,

Almost the cream of mutton fat but juicier
Like leaf-sap or ripest mangostene.

The museum’s chill colours the afternoon sun,
Its jade a texture, of the tongue.

Edward Ragg

Captains and the Kings

She’s got her own style,
And personally, I think she’s very pretty.
But after the funeral,
When I introduced her to the widower,
He laughed. Your wife!?
I thought she was one of the feckin’ nuns!

Like I said, she’s got her own style:
Long black skirt, white blouse, no make-up.
But when we’d had a couple of drinks
And I told him she was thinking of turning Episcopal,
He slammed his fist on the bar and slurred,
Jesus Christ! Is she out of her feckin’ mind!?

James Dufficy

At Harefield Manor

Notice first the half buried brick arches.
They’d held beehives for self-made Sir Thomas – honey to sweeten hams – sugared viands
for a cantankerous, balding, black toothed Queen.
We park under the sycamores.

She’d listened to eulogies of welcome
beneath a massive elm
from players dressed as ‘Time’ and ‘Place’.
It rained in torrents so she remained in saddle,
her face expressionless and very still.

Harefield mud is thick,
its grasping clay clings to our boots.
The Manor’s garden walls are crumbling;
they lead to the vacant eyes of old East Lodge.
Suburban houses crawl over the near hill.

From behind the coppiced hazel,
a gypsy leads a black horse, an ancient mare,
by clutching the hair between her ears.
She descends the sucking path to a low stable
in a fuzz of flies, her spavined legs stumbling.

He says She’s thirty now.
Don’t like being out midday

Them dirt flies lay eggs. She prefers shade.
She stands motionless in the shadows,
not watching as he forks hay into her manger.

Christopher North

The Allegheny Hackle

The proper way to show a glove
is on a brass-cast modelled hand,

(conventionally the right) that stands,
in balance, on a wrist transected

just about an octave span
above the radial styloid process.

The palm is usually slightly cupped
so that a smallish greengage or a peeled

lychee will stick when fitted snugly.
The fingers, spread, subtend an angle

wide enough to hold a cigarillo
or allow a shaded glance

(for thumb and forefinger, of course,
the gap should form a glacial U).

The interphalangeal joints
extend to form a thin-lipped smile

unlike the metacarpo-
phalangeals which knuckle down

to the angle of a hipped barn-roof
or a reed refracted in a pond:

this whole arrangement known,
informally, as the Allegheny Hackle,

which, faute de mieux, has run out of town
the inert, European draping modes

and (rift and rancour yet permitting)
become the choice of the curators

of the Cabot Lodge Accessories Museum
to display the Lieber-Stoller benefaction:

the Gardening Gloves of all the US Presidents.
A peerless collection, and complete

save for the pair from Grover Cleveland’s
second term and those of Warren Harding,

misplaced around the time
of the scandal over Teapot Dome.

Martin Haslam

Three Deer

27/12/08 – 4/01/09

At first we thought the three deer were a man,
a farmer from the parish with his gun.
Then we thought them hares, now three, not one,
and then we saw they were in fact the deer.
They ran across the tablecloth of frost,
then cleared the fence and disappeared in mist.

The days are three parts frost to one part mist.
Christmas week, and each morning you demand
a walk across the fields, West Woods, frosted
Piggledene – the odd rhythms of scare-guns
echoing; lapwings, hornless rams; and the deer
in little clumps of three or four, not one

without an eye on the valley, not one
uncautious at our approach. We stand in mist
and watch in awe the regal harts, these deer.
Have I entered Merrie England now, a man
who balks at artificial hunts, shotgun
cracked over his arm as his boots crunch frost

behind the wellied beaters, firing first
then counting all the grouse and pheasant won?
It’s true, we tend towards change. I have begun
to think about a myth we may have missed,
of a doe being fostered by a Munster man,
given bedding, food and water, held dear

all through winter, helped to rear its little deer
in spring. But in the end he paid the cost,
for when the crops found blight the village men
came to strip the three deer to the bone.
As starved men marched full-armoured in the mist
he fought back with his fists against their guns.

This week the news has blasted with big guns
across the frosted desert, and things look dire.
Outside your kitchen window falls a mist
that swallows up the trees, the birds, the frost.
A fire burns in the churchyard, blackens stone,
and horses flick thick ice-shards from their manes.

This is what we’ll miss, these splendid frosts.
What else is there to gun for, adhere to,
in this one fractured world – what else demand?

Michael McKimm

The Atomic Swerve

freely adapted from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
(On the Nature of Things), Bk. 2, ll. 217-225

Let’s get one fundamental
clear. As atoms stream
into the void’s unceasing
depths, like rain falls,
straight as stair rods,
there comes a random
undetermined point
where each will sway,
unmeasurably, from
the vertical. Without this
fortunate glitch, no atom
would incline to clash
or clinch with any other,
and our mother Nature,
confined in unconverging
parallels, could not
conceive a thing. On this,
of all the infinite worlds,
it is the cue-ball’s kiss
against the blue
which skews it, pat,
into the pocket. Ours
are gods of top-spin, feint
and slice, not base-line
thunderers. Kink, bend,
and deviation govern here.
Not straight.

Barry Taylor

Valise

after Ponge

Because it has come this far with me
lying quiet on the hotel bed,
the brass giving off its shine, the leather
smelling of polish and sweat, I take hold
of it, stroking its back, the length of its sides,

and while it is my treasure chest
of folded white, my clothes, papers,
favourite books, it is also a creature
about to grow fetlocks, mane and tail.
Saddled, bridled, shaking its neck

and handsome head, it hardly gives me
time to duck the ceiling before
galloping down the stairs. Only
when we’re free of the streets,
riding over the mountain range,

do I feel the legs begin to fold,
the head and neck shrink back
to where they came from, leaving me
alone on the hill,
looking down at the town,

the white of my things
spread out on the grass;
in my hand,
still warm,
all that is left of my horse.

Tinker Mather

In Fen Light

Even the fish swim slowly in Lincolnshire.
Dykes and drains cross land so flat

there’s never any hurry for anything
to get anywhere, no strong tidal pull

or rush of rain to flush hillside streams.
No wonder the eels are famously thick.

They’re like the dark arms of men
working in the pea fields

or hoeing acres of red soil. Lurking
among tall reeds the pike grow vast,

their grins more enormous
than sluice gates.

Take any afternoon
as the slow sun rolls a peachy glow

across its even wider field
and pheasants puncture the air,

you can hear labourers
loading long-handled tools

into tractor trailers and, drifting
above hedgetops, nothing distinct

but a beautiful drawl I’m sure means
see you tomorrow, take care. Love even.

Pat Borthwick

Sea Walker

Magpies of the West, drubbed by unparallel rains,
jerk eastwards with a rainbow-raiding wish.
They envy us our silks, our swords, our cranes,
our pillow books, our coastline and our fish.

Our laws give five the blame for any crime –
strict rule of hand whose fingers can’t be fools.
Each fist of virtue staunches blood in time.
Murder’s not done, except by elaborate rules.

You love our robes, pay dearly for the slub
of silk, its naked asymmetric bloom.
Each salad petal roofs a gourmet grub.
Now you’re on stage we’re in your dressing-room.

You roost on beaches, yearly on a whim.
Children fall soft and have no place to hide.
The point, for hours, is being about to swim,
or having just swum: octopus’s bride.

We paddle in the shallows of devotion,
our gaze is still but hasn’t learnt to stare.
We strive to love the surface of the ocean
more than its depths – it’s much more debonair.

We’re fishing for a dream that you’ll agree to –
whoever sweats, or showers, or swims, or shaves.
Imagine a plastic bubble you can see through,
with a child inside. She’s walking on the waves.

Robert Saxton

Night Shift at the Trifle Factory

The plant went on for acres, industrious and humming,
a thousand of us stirring our jelly rich and viscous,
our aprons stained with juices like abattoir reminders.
Think about the volumes: the dairy herds we nurtured;
the raw Jamaican sugar that came scented still with violence;
the casks that we could muster from twenty five bodegas,
in Jerez la Frontera, to soak the dry Madeira.
And lorries big as houses would take their quivering cargo
out to the waiting nations. None saw the drivers faces;
they waited, elevated, but us, we knew our places.
There were favoured positions – we’d huddle, winter-bitten,
next to the steaming cauldrons, and in the stinking summer
with fields of berries swelling and our fingers stung by bees,
we queued to touch the cooling spoons they used to measure cream.
I loved to scissor diamonds from sheets of fine angelica
a mile in diameter, and sit in contemplation in the setting reservation.

And when we daylight workers lay down on sticky blankets
the night shift came from cellars. We feared their white faces
(for they were kept from sunlight), the way they spoke in whispers
and they made special toppings we never saw or tasted.
I knew a boy among them. We sometimes spoke on passing,
as the sun shimmered like jelly in the dish of the horizon,
and he said he missed the daylight, but still he felt important
to rise to his position – the years of application
when skills were honed and sharpened. Only the best were chosen.
This was, of course, before they concocted cuts and quotas
and boys like him were surplus to inferior requirements
and so they were discarded in their hundreds and their thousands.

Clare Kirwan

The Missing

I could spend hours down here in this false warmth
looking for the mice that live between the rails,

reading the posters of the missing. The newest one
is Lucy, school uniform, hair covering one eye.

I start to see her everywhere, inside McDonalds
with a dozen friends, throwing chips at strangers,

sitting on an old grey coat, singing, trying to catch
my eye, brushing past on the tube.

Yesterday, by getting on my hands and knees I saw
her shoes beneath a toilet door and heard her weeping –

it’s not long before she follows me home at night,
stands in the garden, asking if she can have her ball.

Kim Moore

Prospect

Anyone who wanted to could leave, could gather
        shivering on the south side of the river,
labelled and provided for with socks and sweaters
        and a little cash.
                              We walked across the water
in our thousands and left behind for ever
       all that was great: the monuments and sewers,
cathedrals, theatres, mothers, lovers, brothers
   as the flames licked at the city’s raging heart.

Faced with the prospect of living forever,
       we headed for the country lanes together,
imagining the parties de campagne among the clover
       and the stories each would tell the others
             on the way. We had left behind for ever
       all that we had loved. It was a start.

Jane Draycott

The Price of Chocolate

As usual, the scratch of gunfire in the undergrowth
taunts our patrol. My gun rests loose in its sling.

As usual, Serbs sprawl at their checkpoint
eyeing ill-hidden mines. They know
we can kick them aside. They need their ritual.

The one with the words is not the leader.
As usual, negotiation.

One of them cracks through the hedge,
drags out that girl we’ve seen before,
twelve or thirteen, his hand wound in her hair.

Younger than my cousin, she crawls before him.
Frost sprinkles them from the briar.
Our standing orders: let these things go.
There’ll be others like her. She isn’t Lianne.

But there is a glade in her eyes.
I see jackdaw secrets.
I speak hard. Frost crusts each mine
cold as our broken languages.

A carton of Silk Cut is the price of
shoving the dumb bombs aside.
A kitkat and eight smokes from an opened pack enough
to send her scooting back to the woods,
treasuring her bruises for the hoard.

Noel Williams

Property

He buys a pair of pyjamas,
striped flannelette like an old man’s:
a cord round the waist, a gaping fly
to accommodate a catheter.

A nurse fixes a notice
to his bedhead: FAST AFTER MIDNIGHT.
I don’t suppose I shall be, he says,
and she smiles.

In the morning they take him down,
braceleted and triple checked.
Flat on his back, he counts
dead flies in the ceiling lights.

He comes round on a bloody sheet,
all pipework and pain. People shout at him
to wake up, then a needle slides
into his buttock to send him back to sleep.

He wakes from a dream in a clean bed
and peach polycotton pyjamas. In the chair
that smells of wee his wife knits something purple. Soon be home, she says.

Ten days later, they give her his things
in a plastic bag: his watch, dentures, wallet;
an Agatha Christie from the library;
a pair of striped pyjamas, never worn.

Nina Boyd

This Is A Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters
anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote
that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be
recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.
I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase
‘social polish,’ as though she’d acquire it through repetition.
I took an overdose at a child’s 6th birthday party.
I was born in a country which some have called
The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one
that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman
who has known me for years and yet never remembers
who I am—and now she’s involved in a public scandal.
I have been at parties where I was boring.
I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.
I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not
for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.
I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of
misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl
who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.
She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.
Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale
out of kindness—because guilt recognizes guilt,
the way a mother can identify her own child.
I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’
in which the assignment was to complete this statement:
When one door closes, another opens.
I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,
making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.
I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive
suffering. The girl tried to absolve me.
‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’
I know I should thank her if she’s alive,
but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

Kathryn Maris

The Musicologist and the Birdwatcher

I can’t help thinking of them
every time I hear the lark.
Every time I hear the lark,
I think of them,
as I walk around the rim of Eggardon.

It sings above the outer ramparts,
it sings above the grassy top
of the hill fort as I walk back;
sometimes I see it, rising above me,
a dark dot, trilling its grace notes.

Every time, like today,
I remember a programme,
the one with the two men walking,
the camera panning the blue above them,
its focus on the singing bird:

how when they get home, they slow
the recording they’ve made;
they slow it; they play it backwards.
Quickly the musicologist annotates.
Now he plays six bars of Beethoven.

Identical, he says,
the camera panning the score.
Oh! The obsessive musicality
of the bird brain! says the ornithologist.
They marvel at the attentiveness of Beethoven.

If I had my way I’d make a sequel,
I’d make a sequel
about how Beethoven’s soul
has entered the lark, backwards;
how it’s speeded up.

Pam Zinnemann-Hope

North

We were painting the back bedroom
when your flock of snow geese arrived.
They’re making quite a mess in the allotment.

As for the white horse
that galloped down the hill at sundown,
I caught it and shut it in the paddock.

*
Today was the first frost.
A stoat arrived in the morning post.
His fur is already turning to ermine.

We can’t possibly keep him
you know, and Ralph isn’t impressed.
Please. Enough is enough now.

*
The geese flew off yesterday
after their bucketful of oats.
The girls have called the horse Chester.

My new fourth years seem an interesting lot.
Last night I thought I heard an owl
screeching behind the barn, but it was nothing.

*
Today white dolphins were spotted off Start Point
and a narwhal made it upriver
almost as far as Kingsbridge.

I’ve taken up tapestry
and stopped watching the news
though I still turn it on for the weather.

*
The stoat is nesting in the downstairs cupboard.
The allotment is covered in white feathers.
Everything will be all right

but the sky is a red sea with grey islands
and the birds have all disappeared.
They say that blizzards are coming.

Sandra Greaves

Fallujah Birthdays

When you were given to us
I gave you my name,
I rubbed the inside of your mouth
with a soft date,
I sacrificed two sheep for you,
and we feasted.

For your first birthday
I gave you a stuffed camel,
for your second birthday
I gave you building blocks,
for your third birthday
I gave you a drum,
for your fourth birthday
I gave you a jigsaw puzzle,
for your fifth birthday
I gave you your favourite book,
for your sixth birthday
I gave you prayer beads,
for your seventh birthday
I gave you a puppet,
for your eight birthday
I gave you a football.

For your ninth birthday
I gave you new clothes,
I gave you an empty box,
I washed you clean
and kissed you,
and we wept.

For your tenth birthday
I gave you flowers,
for your eleventh birthday
I gave you flowers,
for your twelfth birthday
I gave you flowers.

David Atkinson

All Souls Day 2008

Because I know the devil still exists,
(he’s busy ironing his ref chrysanthemums,
trotting out dates, at this point, unremarkable),

I’ve lit three candles: one for Studs Terkel,
one for the SAS in their Snatch Landrovers
and one for the couple at Clows Top

who wait in their little corrugated house
for the first spot of rain to hit its green tin roof – and there you have it, moments later,

Cantata Momente, Karl Heinz Stockhausen’s
Requiem Mass, tapped out on their door:
a bier for a dead composer. Touch wood

for all souls, waiting in an unbroken circle.
Back-lit falling leaves. He knows them well,
those burned out wounds in their black hides.

Miriam Obrey

Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2008

The following prizewinning poems were chosen by judges, Jo Shapcott and Stephen Knight, who read along with the winning & commended poets at our annual prizegiving event at the Troubadour on Monday 1st December 2008.

• First Prize (£1000): Colony Collapse Disorder, Polly Atkin, Grasmere
• Second Prize (£500): Juxtapose, Barry Tench, Shrewsbury
• Third Prize (£250): In Praise of Hardware Stores, Pat Borthwick, Kirby Underdale

plus, with prizes of £20 each:

• About the Fish in Lake Langano Chris Beckett, London
• The P45 Judy Brown, London
• Shiso Conor Carville, London
• Coffee-Cup Emma Danes, Cambridge
• Guided Tour Josh Ekroy, London
• Tenses Wendy French, London
• Horse Prayers D H W Grubb, Henley-on-Thames
• Frank Rob Hindle, Sheffield
• The Foreigners Sian Hughes, Sibford Ferris
• One Made Earlier Jane Kirwan, London
• A Black Map Richard Lambert, Bristol
• The Return June Lausch, London
• My Autopsy Pippa Little, Cramlington
• Parable Maitreyabandhu, London
• Darling, Would You Please Pick Up Those Books Kathryn Maris, London
• A Young Fisherman Waits for the Weather to Change Mary O’Donnell, Maynooth
• Some Kind of Memento Mori Heather Phillipson, London
• Late Swimming Julian Stannard, Southampton
• Ice-Cream Jack Underwood, London
• Something Almost Being Said Emily Wills, Dursley

Prizewinning Poems 2008

Colony Collapse Disorder

When I lived in the city I knew where I was,
what being there was. I knew I breathed
under a film of constant light,
that electricity was life. It moved
in my body, which I knew was an atom of the city,
and kept us twitching in unity. I felt
information bloom in my blood. It sang
in my cells as though it had always been there.
I knew without it I had no structure.

To leave the city was to leave one’s memory.
Outside was a garden gone wild. Stars
were night-flowers in a mossy dome, opening
their dazzling mouths to amaze, spreading
exponentially the further from the city I went.
I knew nothing. What nothing meant. I feared
the dark and the space between things: space
needs filling. I’d cry for the city, its order.
To be let back in was to regain the future.

Now I live elsewhere the systems reversed.
The city is a picture from a book I once read
and nothing to do with me. Life is a movement
between dirt and sky. I see this clearly.
The stars are generators. Without them we’d fail.
Going back to the city is to speed myself up
to a drawn out buzz that I know is killing me.
Going anywhere other than elsewhere is rehearsing
this end: the shut-down of travelling energy.

All those years living inside weakened me.
Taken away from elsewhere I dim.
Friends visit and tell me that elsewhere is death
and the sky cannot feed me. Not indefinitely.
Their eyes are blown bulbs. They rattle. I smell
honey on their skin and know how it is.
When they move I hear humming like a swarm at a distance.
When they speak I hear their voices, and under
pthe city quietly droning.

Polly Atkin

Juxtapose

Place things side by side;
in a dictionary cook and cooee
entry phone and entwine.

Order in something less than chaos
something more, something swift
and lazy, something in between
something still, constantly humming
like an army of buzzing insects.

Particles of sound bounce
rebound, sense is made from nonsense
then returned more or less intact.

Open the day with horses
haw frost and lemon syrup,
open the evening with diamonds
lavish gravy and a multitudinous ball.
Sparkle with butterflies and expectations,
walk through the day with wet whispers
and whistles, remove any squawking shoes,
buff and polish your toes.

This unwritten manifesto of light
dogs and swallows. Remain unbowed,
unrepentant and under used, above all walk
like you belong, like a lover or a beloved.

As the women gather to discuss
and repair the day, men around water
and wine unpick the stitches while children
run through the woods with no trees
waving banners on their way to grandma’s,
grandpa’s and the grandest summer party.

You can close the curtains now, open the night
to soft voices here is where they sit
on cushions and marshmallows
ignoring the mouse fishing by the light of the fire,
all things are next to each other in the quiet.

Barry Tench

In Praise of Hardware Stores

I love the way they step outside to greet you
waving their long-handled bristle brooms
and yellow plastic dustpans, their sack barrows
and lightweight extending ladders.
They occupy the pavement,
edge towards the butcher’s next door
as if eager to count his chops
or pluck his hung capons.
I swear the clothes props and guttering,
the companion sets and mops
are trying to cross the road.

Strung around the doorframe
are clusters of gleaming pans
like droops of fruit on a vine
and if they let you through
you’re in a grotto with stalactites
and stalagmites, towers of stacking bowls
and buckets, linoleum rolls, stainless steel,
crystal glass, Pyrex, chrome and brass,
galvanized iron and Teflon.

And oh, the sweetness of their breath –
a mingle of beeswax and paint,
Nitromors and paraffin, creosote and rope.

There’s rows of tiny cup-handled drawers
filled with every type and size of screw and nail,
hook and hinge and curtain track end,
oddments you can buy one of, or two gross
and, camouflaged among it all,
is the man who knows where everything is kept
because he loves each single item
as if it were part of his own bloodline.

What more is there to do in life
but help solve each other’s problems,
to put into someone else’s hand
across the polished counter top
something to make their life
glide by more smoothly? Or in one breath
raise the subject of the price of bread,
the race to reach beyond the Universe?

Pat Borthwick

About the Fish in Lake Langano

I have pitched my tent, Abebe, by the lake
night-long in lake breezes
where pebbles crackle cooling
and a thorn acacia scratches at the sky

I wait for you to appear
after the years
and take me fishing: somewhere tonight
you are sitting again on the sand
of my thoughts
untying your shoes

all around is the marvel of sleeping flamingos
crunch of turtles
and way off in the bush
a nameless shuffle that could be hunting dogs
or a cowherd turning over

do the fish know we’re coming, Abebe?
our whispers inch into the silt
our hooks quiver like mosquitoes, prick the water

and as you bend again
into a jaunty boy
hoick your trousers to the knee
I can hear the catfish rise up bubbling

it is too long since he came!
it is too long since he bent forward
and called us to him…

this need in the heart of all beings to be fished

Chris Beckett

The P45

Long and mesmerising,
her explanation rushed past,
like a train in the Midwest.

My hand was pulped
in the moving parts of
one of her complex sentences.

Her syntax pistoned away
dangerously; it was lacquered
and shiny with oil,

punching its perfect rods
into its snug cylinders.
All this noise must be hard

on the men whose job it is
to tend to such machines.
I cannot get a word in.

Her punctuation showered me,
a brown bag of nails bursting
on the atrium’s marble floor.

What else do I remember?
The revolving door twirling.
My bent, martyr’s neck.

Judy Brown

Shiso

Hungry? A shiso leaf, its slick wedge
around a central cicatrice,
the teeth of each serrated edge
green against the white rice.

Though broader at base, smaller,
it’s something like a nettle leaf.
Yet of nettles I remember
mostly slim, baroque, canti-

levered leaves in layers, each one
a demesne of tiny spines;
each tip a dragon’s mazy tongue.
So that can’t be right.

Itadakimasu! I return to:
glistening muscle, seaweed
in strips, soy sauce to dilute
the shiso’s dash of wasabi

and away from those touchy crowds,
their crepuscular murmur,
how they seem to gain ground
when your back is turned.

Conor Carville

Coffee Cup

(after MacNeice)

The moment ripples from my coffee cup:
saucer, arms, table. A lake of sky sensed
in a pinewood. Beyond me a dry crop
of words, that sharp smell of unknown voices;
thickets of feet, prams, shopping that spring up
round chair legs. It takes an eye for silence
to track a path through the tall noise, to duck
away from the canopy of faces –
to sit where light falls open like a book.

Emma Danes

Guided Tour

Come with me my friend, come English,
mind your step in this street, he is Shia,
no-one can move him. The mujahideen want
him to rot in front of his family
in his dirty track suit and broken sandals.
Look how those women turn from the dried blood.

The Shia are cunning and have thicker blood,
Sunnis have hooded eyes and move, English,
with their feet flapping their sandals.
Look at that man, he is certainly a Shia,
you can tell from his shouting family.
Now we leave Mu’alemeen Street. If you want

to visit this morgue, you will also want
a nose tissue because there is stink of blood.
Forty bodies come in – three families.
They have been tortured and dumped, English,
sometimes in the sewage plant, the Shias
float in that black canal with rotting sandals.

The mourners also are attacked, their sandals
stolen too, so their fingers they want
to be on triggers when they leave Shia
area because they feel bad blood
towards them. Behind these blast blocks, English,
they see who is friend, who is family.

Here at barred window, whole families
glimpse over shoulders, count sandals.
Look, come here. You can see the clerk, English,
with computer, he does not really want
to turn it to show on screen pools of blood
for these people at the bars, the Shia.

Come, you can see the dead faces of Shia
if you stand on your toes – that family
is all wiped out – you can observe black blood
and purple bruises, and the tattered sandal.
Come, there is beggar who is never free from want,
and here are the kids with pistols, English!

Englishmen – do they like to take care of family?
Shia is shamed, if they do not. Take off sandals,
this Mosque wants it. Now we are of same blood.

Josh Ekroy

Tenses

sweetbitter Sappho Fragment 130

You ran, no run, I’m going to revert to the present tense
even though the running has ceased except in a kind
of slow motion through re-call. I visit you each day

in those dull grey track-suit trousers, white T-shirt,
you’d always only wear as you hankered after purity
which you said could be found in fields, in cow-dung,

in the mole-hills that uproot your mother’s lawn.
You loved, sorry, love, dawn – the light through the stained
glass windows that catches the dream before it escalates.

Your favourite tree is, (I’m beginning to master these tenses)
the willow, because of the legend you claim, and then there are
the wild ducks you called your own, who, unlike us,

are not surprised at each morning, not surprised at your absence
but who swim round the garden pond. Call. Echo your words.
Bullshit. Life just has to be run. Move on.

Wendy French

Horse Prayers

Bosnia

After the hiding days,the silence days,the days when only
a tree might disguise and walking ghost tracks and streams
and the discovery of abandoned barns and sheds,

we could sometimes see,distant and as if in an old life,
horses, their slow movements, the way their deliberate motion
can be like wheat or wild grass drifting in winds.

It reminded us. It is as if all things can be transformed and
our current thoughts and words and dreams will become
a history and have new meaning and even mosaics.

There will also be the lies and denials and secrets
beneath earth and what the heart cannot forgive and men
who for the rest of their lives will go out into fields

to speak to their horses about horror. They will do this
in the evenings and when they cannot face their children
and perhaps when good news arrives from abroad.

They will tell the horses about some of these things,
looking them in the eyes,careful with the words and
the order of memory,as if approaching prayers.

They will tell about a woman who gave birth in a tree,
about soldiers who led an elephant out of the ruined zoo,
about the man who shot the man who shot his older brother;

they will tell about hearing the sounds of their village
and how the dreams were always about returning
and embracing and where was the money?

And the fields will become trusted again and the walls
be built of stories and the horses accept these accounts
and the older brother be present whenever we sit down to eat.

D H W Grubb

Frank

Frank bites the skin off his thumbs,
chomps pencils till his lips are flecked
with crumbs of paint . He twitches
like the pestered rump of a cow:
motes of him shiver down his shirt
and settle in his books’ interstices.
In the silent afternoons of English Lit
you hear him, intent, oblivious, like an otter
munching the spine and skull of a fish.

There are stories. How his gran was found
on the moor, bewildered, soaked through;
how one Christmas Eve Frank’s dad
(who no-one ever saw) smashed up his shed
with an axe and made a fire to burn all night;
how he, Frank, had had a twin who lived
a month in a machine, a girl named Margaret.

I was at his house one evening
and a bird flew into their kitchen.
Frank said it’s an owl but it looked
so small as it rushed the window,
battering the black glass. We all sat
till it found the dark it had come from,
plunged back in. Frank said an owl
but I thought he was wrong.

Rob Hindle

The Foreigners

sit me down on their bright green leather sofa,
offer brandy in a washed-out peanut butter jar

feed the children huge plates of rice and meat
one at a time, because they lost the other spoons,

laugh at our attempts to say “please” and “thank you”
in their own language, mispronounce “cough”,

“proper” and “urine” (which is good for a sprain)
and pack six tins of fish for the birthday picnic

where they’re unimpressed with ring-a-roses,
“What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” Back home,

a birthday party for one year old, you need rope,
and all the male children. First tie up the child

tight, tight, one side of the hill. Fire a gun
in the air, for the start, then all the cousins run,

all the male cousins, all ages, fast as they can
down the side of the hill, up the other side,

to the knife. Oh yes, you need a knife,
a good knife, stuck hard down in the ground.

One boy, the fastest, he gets to the knife
then runs to the child, cuts the rope. The winner.

He gets a hundred US dollars. If the family is poor,
it might be a horse. Just a normal mountain horse.

Sian Hughes

One Made Earlier

She makes a mum out of old sweaters
uses jam jars – newly washed –
that scrubbing board for clothes found in the shed.

She makes it quickly, on spec, refuses to check it’s ok
trims off the odd thread but doesn’t care if the stitches are slack

– this version stirs the porridge briskly,
considers corsets de rigeur.

She makes something solid and soft, stuffed with clean goose-feathers
each goose personally plucked, each personally butchered.

She makes one before breakfast in the summer, before it gets cloudy
carries on long after others have stopped for tea

makes a genuine artefact, a hole, a cave, a source
gets rid of the sour smell, the sweat.

She could go for supplies, a Vogue pattern, but the tissue’s
so easily ripped, wishes she could match the silks.

This mum’s immaterial, shoddily made, a sort of tin-man
tin mother, all cans and Sambuca. Agitated she puts it in a pile

with the others. She was never a Girl Guide, not even
a Brownie, yet she wants to get it right
a snip here with scissors, more chalk, still something missing.

Jane Kirwan

A Black Map

Catching a bus
is a Herculean task

like emptying the Augean stables
of shit,

and this room
whose bright curtains

don’t touch the sill
is mine. When it rains

I hear the whole city
run beneath me,

a black map,
another city,

one that shines
and trickles.

Richard Lambert

Return

When a man has lived almost seventy years,
reared six thousand goats and buried two wives,
he longs to return to the city of his youth,
which he finds, has grown in his absence,
even more beautiful,
with its gold clock and minarets,
its marble apartment blocks
and the new indoor shopping mall,
all haloed in September’s glow
and steeped in the scent
of coffee, tamarind and desire.

He sits on a bench in the city square,
one stop from the bus station,
with a bag at his feet and watches the girls,
the taxis, the lovers, then feeds the birds
until the chairs are stacked and it’s time to go.

June Lausch

My Autopsy

Disintegrate me gently : I am slices of pink-skin sushi,
slides of eyelash and lipstick, sand from under my thumbnail, a faint
smudge of that sandalwood you hated:

swab my throat, photograph my bones, unzip
the two curls of my red-sea ribcage, weigh my heart,
my lights, my liver in your metal bowl,

separate the grains and sinews of my last meal, last smile, last
kiss, peel me like a peach, slightly over-ripe, split my
old rose layers of tissue from their yellowed sleeves:

your long gaze sweeps me the way sea searches shingle
all along the beach. Or how the lighthouse
seeped its blue light between our closed curtains.

I am clean now. Blank as a runway, an unloading ramp.
I have tried to tell you, I have tried so hard to tell you
there was a house you wandered through

leaving your prints on the door, your breath on the downstairs window,
not noticing the flowers there, the lilies, or the books
in languages unknown to you.

Pippa Little

Parable

God left our universe and went to another
where the people were just discovering him.
The sky was particularly bright for his departure,
the grand Renaissance gardens extra-specially clipped.
It was morning. Boating lakes and tennis lawns
fell silent, as from the departure of a giant.
The tree-lined horizon, relieved from the heavy feet
of millennia, lifted slightly and swayed. Rabbits
ducked out of the briars, noticing absence of authority
while they ate. A boy, dying in bed, heels pushed hard
into the horsehair, thought his mother had come in
to open a window.

Maitreyabandhu

Darling, Would You Please Pick Up Those Books?

How many times do I have to say
get rid of the books off the goddamn floor
do you have any idea how it feels
to step over books you wrote about her
bloody hell you sadist what kind of man
are you all day long those fecking books

in my way for 3 years your acclaimed books
tell me now what do you have to say
for yourself you think you’re such a man
silent brooding pondering at the floor
pretending you’re bored when I mention her
fine change the subject ask “Do I feel

like I need more medication” NO I don’t feel
like I need more medication it’s the books
don’t you see don’t you see it’s her
why don’t you listen to anything I say
and for god’s sake books on the floor
are a safety hazard remember that man

from Cork who nearly died fine that man
fell over a hurley not a book but I don’t feel
you’re getting the point the point is that a floor
is not an intelligent place for books
books I have to see and books that say
exactly where and how you shagged her

what shirt she wore before you shagged her
I can write a book too about some man
better still about you I can say
something to demonize you how would you feel
about that ha ha why don’t I write a book
about how I hoover your sodding floor

and how you’ve never once hoovered your floor
why can’t I be a muse why can’t I be a “her”
what does one have to do to be in a book
around here do I have to be dead for a man
to write me a poem how do you think it feels
to be non muse material can’t you say

you feel for me what you felt for her
can’t you say I’m better than that woman
can’t you get those books off the floor?

Kathryn Maris

A Young Fisherman Waits For The Weather To Change

Since we anchored two hookers, leath bhád
agus bád mór *, together in the harbour,
our luck is gone.

The morning of the wedding,
I glanced uneasily at the sky: this is folly,
I murmured, too polite to speak aloud
in the presence of her parents.
All summer the vapours, sweeping our island.
Sailing impossible, boats tied,
some smashed by fists of storms,
what some call ‘rain god’.

In a new home, we play with bright gadgets,
each room too white, too defined by what we own.
We fiddle with things. We tease one another.
In the absence of play, roughness, limbs
bound in anger as, yet again, the sky pummels down.
Though complicit, she looks at me queerly.

On the computer, on television, the weatherman
forfeits old charms for the sake of bottled tan,
bleached teeth, the pace of World Wide Weather.
In essence, nimbo-this and strato-that, all leading
to afternoons of cumulonimbus,
when we distract ourselves in a swirl
of unchanged linen, pillows rank with our odours.

Tonight the sky screws down like a heavy lid,
tight to the horizon, not a star to be picked
to send a wish or a dream, leaving only
the sullen wraiths that squat on our roof.
I do not pray. There are no gods to speak of –
sun, wind, or rain.

Come, winter! Our haul of haddock,
sardines, the meaty lobster she craves.
Come, winter, long and cold,
with hoar-frost, pelts of northern wind
drying our barrels, silencing the gutter!

I wait for cirrus – a high screen of ice,
crystal haloes above the water, the secret
shoals: sea and sky for once holding distant,
as if in recognition. Then, the boats
recreated in fresh pitch,
umber sails hoisted. The pair of us
at work we know, salt in the creases
around our eyes.

(* traditional boats once used in the West of Ireland)

Mary O’Donnell

Some Kind of Memento Mori

The woolly mammoths are all gone.
For twenty three and a half hours a day I forget
and then a 40 watt bulb blows as I turn it on.
The burnt-out bayonet is something unspoken –
the filament no longer incandescent,
the electric current without an outlet.
Little has changed since the Pleistocene.
Removal of the bulb is a change of epoch.

Instead of mammoths in Siberia
there are elephants in Africa, elephants in India,
the new gloom of silhouettes and table lamps.
There’s a pearl bayonet in the cupboard, unopened.
Shapely as a pear, it brings to light the shadows
already here inside the shadows that follow.

Heather Phillipson

Late Swimming

When I want to be near my brother
I swim into the ocean and I swim breastroke
so that my chest and stomach are
pointing down and I can feel his finger

scraping its way down my front which is
peculiar but homely too, and when
I’ve swum a sizable distance
I tread water which feels like I’m sitting

on his shoulders which is wonderful
and then I know I must head back
because the boats are becoming
an archipelago of lights calling the

fish into their nets, the same fish
that will beat their little jig
in the market after the sun has risen
when the city is clattering into life.

But my brother always holds my feet
and I can see the shore slipping
into the cocktail hour and I have
to speak to him, but not unkindly.

Brother, it’s so good being with you
and I’m glad you’re doing well
but my time has not yet come
and people are waiting on the shore

and I feel his hands let go
which means I can really strike out now
and soon the shore is coming fast
and this time I don’t look back.

Julian Stannard

Ice-Cream

The message got through that tanks
from the Army of our Great Nation
were only weeks away.

We had four frozen horses left to eat,
so saving the fine French chair from the fire,
took turns to sit and pull hot steaks apart
with dirty hands.

The message never got through that tanks
from the Army of our Great Nation
were hollowed-out by shells, thumped,
just inside the border.

We received no word, no supplies, no orders,
but picked our teeth in secret, at night,
the fires growing dimmer, the rats more brave.

In a month all that remained of the horses,
the chair, were spindles of legs
holding up the useless dream
of a message getting through that summer
was only weeks away and the cold we felt inside
was really just relief, ice-cream.

Jack Underwood

Something Almost Being Said

After the usual songs from The Lion King, when Junior Strings
and Intermediate Recorders have been blown away
by the Swing Band, the children unstop their voices,
hurtle outside, where already the good mothers
are cutting and pouring, and the rest of us follow
shuffling into the miraculous sun. But I’m stuck

by the door with somebody’s grandad, who’s trying and trying
to tell us something. Here is the effervescent light, the old rose
on the older wall, its precise, articulating buds; here is that first warmth
slipping its delicious arm into the small of my back – and here he is,
just about saying that whatever it is, it’s important, going on and on
not saying it, spittle, contort and twist. And of course

I’m sorrying, lump-throated, inept, while trying to overhear
Tom’s dad muscling in on Dawkins, going for intelligent design,
and Beth and Sue missing the point of Atonement, how it all ends,
while I can’t move for not getting it, this important thing – the old man
clamping vibrato hands on my shoulders, and Pete,
who’s good like that, saying It must be frustrating for you.

I’m close up against it now, the blue Braille of his eyes,
sour breath and blear, his slack face straining every useless nerve.
Unfocussed children arpeggio the green, and suddenly
I’m falling through the glass of his gaze, into a pool of notes,
reeling them in, trying them out for sound – The music,
you enjoyed the music, I say, and watch as his face

rewinds, shedding the stroke, the sicknesses and wars,
back to concert tours, bands, busking. How they danced, then,
and now his good arm arcs to the final note, his practised smile
lit up and bowing, before he stands, applauding us
applauding him, accepting all the flowers.

Emily Wills

Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2007

The following prizewinning poems were chosen by judges, Helen Dunmore and David Constantine, who read along with the prizewinning poets at our annual prizegiving event at the Troubadour on Monday 3rd December 2007.

• First Prize: The Smell of Grass, John Haynes
• Second Prize: These Women, Siobhan Campbell
• Third Prize: Moon Man, Patricia Bishop

plus, with prizes of £20 each:

• Black & Red, Alyss Dye
• Cold Toast, Ann Pilling
• Two-Stroke, James Underhill
• No Words, Jenny Vuglar
• His and Hers Espaliers, Siobhan Harrison
• Second Sight, Paul Groves
• Chasing the Nightjar, Martyn Crucefix
• Strawberries, Sue Macintyre
• Citadel of the Husband, Karen Green
• Your Moth Hands, Amanda Dalton
• This is the Gift my Mother Gave Me, Alice Kavounas
• In the Wash, Pat Borthwick
• In Praise of Aunts, M R Peacocke
• Le Lion Rouge est Sur la Table, Julian Stannard
• Baby Dies When Brother Crawls Into Cot, David Gilbert
• The Dead Mother, Miriam Obrey
• Nightwalker, Mario Petrucci
• Sunday Afternoons, Bill Greenwell
• The Other, Roger Elkin
• Dandelion, Giles Goodland
• Scarlet Tiger, Ruth Sharman

Prizewinning Poems 2007

The Smell of Grass

Voices don’t change. Your skin, it smells like grass.
Same ah, same ess, same disembodied past,
turned into breath, the shape ALADDIN cast
onto the ceiling by the stove, the cartons
stacked for shelves, the book propped up on bare
schoolgirlish freckled breasts – as faint as hair
brushing an arm, it comes back now, your Where-
of one can’t speak, held floating in the air
which was the limit of a world, yes, there-
of one must needs keep schtum, however clear
now on the phone, polite, practical, older,
that tongue, that wet ribbed palate, those familiar
lips pressed up so close against my ear.

You’re going to be a priest, or hope you are,
and will I write and say that no, no evil passed
between us? Not the smallest, not the least
grained spot, no, not the faintest mote or caste,
grudge or regret. I will. You are released
of me. Except for words, of course, this past
perfect tense with its vestige of possess
held in the doing words, have loved, have kissed,
have known. But now, since you’ve become alas
so business-like, of course I won’t trespass
upon—against—those no longer blond hairs,
a lock of which I foolishly did once
cut as you slept, and kept, like evidence—

of memory as such, the panes of glass,
the street below, a figure going to cross,
the Army Navy donkey jacket, nose
wrinkling against the flakes, as all those cars,
bikes, busses, vans, lorries, surge—like the past—
between us, until suddenly I’ve lost
you, no you’ve crossed below, and now the rusty
fire escape shudders the entire place
like premonition. Soon that door will rasp
back on the lino, that rectangle of stars
will be blacked out as sleeves lift hissing fast
around my ears, and those cold kissing, hard
lips whisper: grass, your skin smells like the grass.

As cold as any border ballad ghost, her star
roles are all ended, all her magic cast
into a sea whose great thrashings and gasps
loop thin film over looping film at last
whispering how nothing matters much, not loss,
not love, not lust, not flesh, how flesh is grass.

John Haynes

These Women

       ‘These men are no dreamers’
        MacDiarmid, The Wreck of the Swan

These women are no dreamers.
They make happen the full wake,
the kettle hopping, the oven warm.

They take death in hand
and force him to be civil.
In their lighting, the spitting candle calms
and the rosary settles out of irony.

These women are not kind
if you do not iron the sheets you borrowed,
if you bring batch instead of sliced,
what good is that for the sandwiches?

These women bar all holds in the
screamed stall of the birthroom.
Instead they ask for the gummed grit
they found for themselves in that
most alone of coupled moments.

These women know how to mash potatoes
so that they charge despair
out of a teenager.

They have followed a father
and a small child on a combine harvester,
not to pick up the pieces of the boy’s arm
and bring them to his mother,
but because they felt the call of the back field
like something rotting in the feed shed
before chief rat jumps out.

These women will not pass through
the horse meadow, even on a summer night,
for there they have felt that the world might let us go.

They’ve seen the consequence of that.
Ironing keeps it at bay
and doing what is right.

Siobhan Campbell

Moon Man

This is the road where the walls were broken

this is the man who stands all alone
in the road where the walls were broken.

This is the moon whose light discloses
the idiot man who stands alone
in the road where the walls were broken.

This is the window shedding its light
on the man with the face so round and white,
wringing his hands and clutching his sacks,
in the road where the walls were broken.

There ae boys in caps and trainers
pushing and prodding the man and his sacks,
who is caught in the light of the ground floor window,
under the roofs and chimney stacks
in the road where the walls were broken.

This is the lamp shattered and dark
under the arch that’s cold and stark
where the man with sacks stands all alone
as the boys with fists and faces of stone
stop their chi-iking and hold his fast
in the road where the walls are broken.

These are the seconds that hang like a shroud
over the man with his head in a cloud
under the window shedding its light
on the poor man’s face so round and white
whose left hand shakes, whose right, hand flaps
at the rowdy boys in trainers and caps
in the road where the walls were broken.

This is the doorway numbered and locked
where the moon man lies with his moon eyes shut
and the boys are racing through Carters’ Cut
as the clock in the tower chimes quarter to six
and the shadows are still and moon eclipsed
in the road where the walls are broken.

Patricia Bishop

Black & Red

Your tongue was coated
with a black layer, your eyes unseeing
and you pushed away my hand as though freeing
me to drink the hospital tea and eat that stale bread-
and-butter, leaving unsaid
things like love and confessions, these being
too late now that you were finally fleeing
the world. The blackbirds and the red
roses outside, which, as a rule,
we would have remarked upon in that closeted
room, were forgotten while
I noticed the headline on your newspaper about fuel
going up and the nurse deposited
a red pill on your table with a smile.

Alyss Dye

Cold Toast

I break this bread in memory of her
who loathed waste who,
when you chomped the new loaf, stoically nibbled
on some black curled crust from the bottom of the crock her fingers
holding it tight and symmetrical like the neat
claws of a mouse who,
while you slabbed on best butter, took
the thinnest scraping, had given you also
her wartime eggs and meat. This board I chop on,
this fine bleached block, she snaffled one day from the Backs
behind your house,
from rubbish chucked out for the bin-men: she liked things free.

For years I thought it was meanness, hating
her pinched, crimped ways that hard
glitter of triumph over a penny saved here, twopence there.
But there is in you
this incorruptible vein that runs right down
and it comes from the strong, straight die of her love

from toast left out for her men while she,
unbreakfasted, cleaned a school in the thin
before-dawn light, from shirts
folded like works of art and set to air,
from that old bleached board
scrubbed white for me again and again
by her little hands.

Ann Pilling

Two-Stroke

The others set off from the quay with whoops and shouts.
They hang out from their hulls, sleek in wetsuits, and grin.
In half an hour, they are orange triangles on the horizon.
But sailing’s not your thing, so you think to hell with it.

Instead, you fire up an old outboard
and putter off towards the middle of the bay.
But it’s no fun—noisy, smelly and pointless.
So you switch off and sulk in silence for a while.

When you wake, there are more people
in your fibreglass affair than you remember setting out with.
There’s a wife for a start, and she’s sitting there on the middle seat
smiling at you, like you know who the hell she is.

And there are some children dipping their hands
over the side and not catching your eye.
And of course, the outboard won’t start and it’s no good keeping
pulling at it because it makes you look flappy and foolish.

At the back of this swaying tub there are some people
in body-warmers, who give weakly encouraging smiles
and hopeless impractical suggestions.
And you think, ‘Who the hell let them on?’

Then a sea fret drifts in and you can’t see five yards ahead.
You didn’t bring a compass, or tools, or anything
that competent people stash away in little lockers.
You’ve just got two tins of Stella and a small pork pie.

Well, how the hell were you to know you’d
need to feed a lot of passengers?
Another hopeful smile from an old-timer at the back,
your wife frowning and the children still avoiding eye-contact.

Later, you contemplate flopping over the side and splashing off
into the fog in any direction. But then you think
that something is bound to happen.
You won’t be sitting here in five years’ time.

James Underhill

No Words

I have no words to describe it, the safety I seek;
the thick cushioned couch, the red walls, the table
shining at night. I have no words.

The low rumble of a neighbour’s voice, his unknown
lieder an echo of despair, stopping and starting, an
unaccompanied voice as he prepares for bed.

The voice that wakes me in the night. The draped dusk
rent. The moon-lit street and its long agony repeated.
The three foxes who fade into shadows.

And waiting among piles of books and the violin left careless
on the table, among paintings and postcards of paintings,
in the small pool of light shaped by a hand-made shade;

waiting for words to lean out of the dark like a
sparkler on bonfire night and write in great letters that
shimmer and hang

an impossible blessing, something that keeps
the dark out there in the mouths of vixens.

Jenny Vuglar

His and Hers Espaliers

One tree stood x-rayed, condemned
without consultation. He shook
and collapsed. Spatchcocked,
he waited for the heat of the day
to finish him off. He didn’t have time
to die noisily; he crumbled to spores,
left a few branches for evidence. Leaves
fell by the bed, he undressed like an ancient
lover at the hands of a mortician sky.

Intelligent birds shifted in the dark
on to her, swaying as she dozed.
She stretched awake to tidy clouds.
Contagions of insects scratched her
lumpy limbs. She heard the wasps
had left his marrow. She looked down.
Old shade had resigned. She noticed
spring flowers wreathed the gap;
arum lilies, foxgloves, and columbines.

Siobhan Harrison

Second Sight

“Throw back the shutters. Let me watch the dawn,”
my uncle, blind from birth, was fond of saying.
His rambling chateau outside Matignon
was witness to intuitive surveying:
his sixth sense outran five, breaking the tape
ahead of me. Such sentience was alarming.
He drank the wine. I fumbled with the grape,

my teenage years unfocued. He was charming,
at ease in every situation, guided
gently by his introverted wife.
The hammock in the orchard had provided
one of the best memories my life
held in its valise: their daughter Sarah
kissing me while I hung, half-asleep,

between the boughs, her skin like demerera,
her breasts pubescent. Silences too deep
for words contained us. He knew that. At dinner
in the library we ate a dozen
oysters, me a sloppy-jowled beginner.
“I do not mind if you caress your cousin
so long as there are limits to your action.

Just avoid transgression.” Did he mean
me or her or both of us? Attraction
should not be denied.” The man had ‘seen’
our fondness while Madame had been out shopping.
Even the bivalves on the Meissen plate
seemed party to our tenderness, the stopping
of the heart, love’s tremulous first state.

Paul Groves

Chasing the Nightjar

Nowadays they say she’s often mistaken
for the revving of a little petrol engine—

her propulsive churr-churring lost in the dark.
But age-old tricks can still be made to work.

Launch a white handkerchief into the air
and—if you are lucky—she is gliding there,

coming to you like a catch in the throat,
summoned by signs of life—the hot, the salt

of sudden tears you’d rather were hidden,
making your nose run like a child’s again.

Or she is drawn to the blood-spill of a hurt
that opens flesh and bone. Or she will start

from the dusty roof-space above the bed,
find you wiping love from between your legs.

The white flag of your individual weakness
is what will serve always to conjure her best—

as when old habits and eyes are giving out,
when it seems dark whenever they leave the light.

She comes then—I think—and this time stays
cover him, cover him, cover his face.

Martyn Crucefix

Strawberries

Odette’s footman is bringing in the lamps,
it’s a winter afternoon, outside

the low dark street,
the careless disarray of the season,

but in this small space the lamps read
like embroidered strawberries

in a dusty tapestry. She has
plumped up her great cushions

of Japanese silk for him,
keeping a sharp eye on the footman,

scolding him for his clumsiness.
There’s a harsh scent of chrysanthemums.

I don’t want to move forward
or back—return over and over

until the scene, the scents
breathe off the page—like

coming upon a great uncle’s brown
wallet in a box of stale family papers,

unfolding it and finding
his wife’s two small wills inside—

she thought she was dying twice.
Her white hair, her giggle float up.

She writes to ‘My darling husband’
in her precise ornate handwriting,

apologises for her silly ways,
lists her bequests: to me

her seed-pearl bird brooch,
her turquoise earrings.

Sue Macintyre

Citadel of the Husband

He is a walled city, a resolute citadel,
a fortified castle with ramparts, and boiling oil

at the ready, to parry attack from a hostile world
and archers at every arrow slit, willow bows curled,

gnarled woody fingers keeping the tension high
while the lookouts squint for messages from the sky—

sudden scuds of birds, ink-black against the blue,
or the onset of dusk with shadows that hide the foe.

The walls are at least three feet thick and the great hall
is warmed by a lonely fire where one and all

tear the charred roasted meat from the broken bones
of hard-to-identify animals, flick out the stones

with their personal sharp-bladed oiled and pointed knives
from the fruit stored since last summer in the castle’s eaves,

sleep in a tangle of battle-clothes, snores, and dreams
that are always forgotten, wake up with schemes

of how to vanquish the enemy, how to defend
the almost impregnable fort from the former intimate friend

who lives underneath the medieval turrets and moat
down on the snow-pocked slopes in a thatched straw hut.

Karen Green

Your Moth Hands

move so quickly through the air
you’re almost bound to scratch them on a thorn,
snip a thumb with the kitchen scissors, rap
those thin-skinned knuckles on the window-ledge.
I sit on the floor with the dog and hold the lilies
till you want them, try to memorise
hypercium, euphorbia, the knack
of wiring foliage, which stems you split.
But afterwards I’ll just recall the thin coil
of your wedding ring, the veins that spread
like broken stalks across your hands, a dab
of scarlet polish on your nails and on one
fingertip, and chipped, because you’re carefless
over almost everything but flowers.

Amanda Dalton

This is the Gift my Mother Gave Me

“Act as if a thousand eyes are upon you”
was my mother’s parting shot
every day as I left the house for school.

So I divided those thousand eyes by two —
five hundred people seemed slightly less
intimidating — and I guessed that
of those five hundred, at least fifty
were far too tired to notice me. Another fifty
had, I hoped, forgotten their glasses,

and perhaps a further fifty were blinded
by worry — about losing their jobs, or
forgetting to lock the door. But that still left
three-hundred fifty, all out there, waiting
for me to put a foot wrong. I figured
that a hundred of them were foreign
and didn’t understand my mother’s dictum.

Which still left two hundred and fifty
eagle-eyed pedestrians peering at me.
I wrote off another fifty by deciding
they were newly-weds, and so in love
they had eyes only for each other.

The last two hundred remained a problem.
I silently assigned them a book to read —
and those in a rush, the newspaper.
On the subway no one glanced at me. See?
Mother was wrong, though I tended to sit up
straight, and tried not to snap my chewing gum.

Alice Kavounas

In the Wash

Father, forgive us for finding you out this way,
your three children undressing you
to look like Mammy’s plucked goose lying there.
     How you’d hate us to see this naked truth
preferring your weather-hardened coat
buttoned to the chin, your tight-laced boots,
your pulled down cap.
     We are charged with the task of bathing you
before the delicacy of your shroud
your skin suddenly our own skin.
We are amazed to find we even share
the same imperfections of our feet—
toes three and four like Siamese twins.
I’m soaping them while Michael wipes
what he says is a tear from your eye.
     You always told us that to cry
was a breached dam or broken fence
the herd could wander through.
We’re seeing you without your carapace
                           and when Colm
shook out your pockets just now
instead of your knives and baler twine,
there were sacks of seeds.
     And was that a lake,
its ear flat to the ground,
a full sun swimming in it?
     Your crumpled hankerchief
contained a shower of moths and butterflies
enough to blow the whole Earth
into a different orbit, or further
                           And then Father,
from deeper in your pocket,
a nest enclosing three warm and freckled eggs.

Pat Borthwick

In Praise of Aunts

I conjure Aunts, sly laughers,
Aunts not of the blood
but of the spirit; invite
from their cold cots for scones and tea
Aunts who chould cheat
and fib for fun, playing Old Maid
in silent riot, keeping a card
up a knickerleg; Aunts who would never
hurt a child to do it good;

Aunts without men, good sports,
bachelor Aunts eternally retired
who liked dogs, who could whistle,
Aunts with pockets, pocketsful
of small timely treats,
and not wincing at stickiness
nor at blood as they strode
through the war, through the wards,
voluntary servant goddesses.

You women long at peace,
rooted in sycamore scrub
beneath St. Peter’s topsyturvey stones
without memorial: I will praise
your names, your dented hats and bulging shoes,
who pedalled across my dream
last night with shining spokes and hubs
and cracked halloos and glimpses of knees,
old children in your upright childless bones.

M.R. Peacocke

Le Lion Rouge est Sur la Table

Don’t forget to say Madame Hoare, my mother said.
Bonjour Madame Hoare, I said; Bonjour Julien and Madame Hoare.
I really liked Madame Hoare because she had a red lion.
She said, Julien where is the red lion?
I said, Madame Hoare the red lion is on the floor.
Madame Hoare took the red lion and placed it on the table.
Julien, écoute, où est le lion rouge?
Madame Hoare, I said, le lion rouge est sur la table.
Bien sûr, le lion rouge est sur la table!
French, I decided, was a beatiful and accurate language.

Several days later I was bitten by a snake.
Madame Hoare sent a letter saying how worried she was.
At the end of the letter she wrote Julien, où est le serpent?

Years later I found myself in Paris.
I think Id forgotten almost everything about Madame Hoare.
She might have died.
Perhaps the snake which had nearly done for me
had wound its way out of our garden of rumbutans
and slipped across the island
with the sole purpose of biting Madame Hoare.
Où est le serpent? JE SUIS ICI??!

Years later I was sitting in a café on the Left Bank.
I was talking to a Frenchman who was worried.
Julien, he said, où est La Liberté?

I looked across the table and saw a lion which was red
and behind the bottle of Pernod I saw a moving snake.

I said, La Liberté est sur la table.

Julian Stannard

Baby Dies When Brother Crawls Into Cot

The boy leans in to read the headline
Narrows to the story beneath

The father skims the article
Waits for the boy to finish

They glance at each other and nod
Before turning the page

The train emerges from the tunnel
Daylight rushes into the carriage

They both look out of the window
The sky is as grey as before

There’s a blurring of fences, allotments,
Hedges and trees. And together

Their warm fingers drum
In rhythm on their knees.

David Gilbert

The Dead Mother

We washed her chest. I saw how quick
death made a stranger of her
and since the power had failed

I brushed her hair by candle light.
The, turning the corpse
easily between us, we washed her back.

My sister sneezed. Her flannel dropped.
I paused. The candles burned unevenly
as rosewater from my cloth

trickled down our mother’s wrist
making her fingers flex, or so it seemed.
Faster then with shorter strokes

I washed her feet and circling
watched our shadows on the wall
struggle and flop like hares in a net

until we two stopped, leaving her
a dark reflection of herself
and night framed in the naked window.

Miriam Obrey

Nightwalker

(Flanders, 1917)

‘Rest squares reckonings’ Ivor Gurney

It was not dusk, not yet, when he
Stood— night’s last dim silhouette full
teetering he stood, out of nod with step as shut-
eyed he dreamed himself over the top, head

unhelmetted, mud-tousled, nod-heavy as
some old carthorse long overdue for the yard,
hands meek by pockets, top button askew as he
lurched serene and sleep-stupid through

wire’s one blasted gate where first-startled
bullets hissed their stave on his air on death yet
refused to thread his upright rest until

Jerry for himself saw how the wretch so
utterley slept to war, and with his heart-enemy’s
heart full-squared in his sight let his firing-pin drowse,
left the trigger slack—let his one man

walk who would take too easy death’s touch, too
easy—as a child might draw sigh mid-slumber at a mother’s
kiss then turn, in that small unthinking span
of self, small shoulders to the dark.

Mario Petrucci

Sunday Afternoons

There was no sport on. Our fathers,
filled with gin, lay breathing

in the front-rooms; in the back,
our mothers fuddled over flowers,

or laid their prayer-books end to end.
They had no child but us.

We sat like national anthems,
pompous and circumstantial, hands

practising a saraband,
sinking like skiffs, or teasing sugar

over the silent fire. Clocks
held back, haughtly or superstitious

drolling their chimes behind shut doors.
In those days we had pantries,

sculleries, smoke-rooms,
cupboards under the front stairs.

There were no maids. We had
to ration our breath. Our houses

were fogged, were doldrums,
waiting for adolescence, for wars.

Bill Greenwell

The Other

Mum’s Dad: the silent one,
standing apart, hovering on the edge of things;
bland face never flagging what was going on inside his head;
his dress, residue-Edwardian: flannelette work-shirt,
stained waistcoat, flat cap, and that Meerschaum pipe—
anchor of his being—always keeping him company.

He behaved as if remaindered
by his daughter’s self-made in-laws (retail drapery):
so what he’d learned working with railway haulage—
hammering bolts, clanking wagon wheels, applying torque—
had been outlawed by commerce;
his presence long since shelved to silences.

Being poor, therefore boring, there was no sense in talking
with him other than formalities of greeting and departure
(better the latter), and the yes-no interludes of need.
And having no transport, so needing ferrying everywhere,
was named “Mr pain-in-the-bum” by his son-in-law.

His daughter manufactured tantrums round his habits:
living-rooms filled with shag-tobacco fumes; shaving-scum
left salt-and-peppering the porcelain; his sloping off, AWOL,
to The Crown and Cushion, swilling Worthington’s bitter
till tiddly, then swanning back to our house where he riddled
her night’s quietness with his pissing in the bucket—and sometimes
missing, as witnessed by the lino’s counterpoint betrayal.

But had his quieter triumphs:
like sharing with this grandson what he knew
about stripping spritting side-shoots from carnations:
his clasp-knife blade slicing ice-green stems
and keeping them spliced apart by touch of grit,
then dribbled into earth, to root, just there—and there:
handing those scarlet wounds down three generations.
All done with practised skilfulness. And silently.
No room for words
till now.

Roger Elkin

Dandelion

My son as a toddler: he is
as if planted by light
the path ahead of him loosens into shadows
and language waits
as the sun works out flowers.
A catkin of dried snot hangs from his nose.
How soft the future is.
The stick-figure trees
through his hands are coming closer.
Under his finger, a grasshopper
idles its engine.
Branches seeth overhead and the sound
of crying inside his chest subsides,
one finger pointing up.
How much must he contain.
An oak is dancing just slightly
and leaning on a thought,
leaves silvering in the wind.
A machine of light moves on the river,
reflections cancelling each other.
His shadow puddles beneath him.
Now he is holding the unblown globe
of a dandelion, singing secrets into
its white microphone,
then the sky is full of more objects
than we can find metaphors for.
The words troubling his face break
into white fragments,
he flails his tongue, inciting insight
as into the water the goose heaves its song.
A blind man silently packs the days
behind us, a gentle man, park keeper
or warden, and in the grass he finds
a clot of words, messed and
with a trail of footprints leading
towards a horizon that will not be reached,
where contrails wither like plantstems.

Giles Goodland

Scarlet Tiger

We’d have killed it
if we’d had the courage—
to crush a body this
bloated or stamp on wings
like shrivelled walnuts.
Was it a mutant? Too slow
to break free and make
for the open?

It scuttled out of the leaves
and frass, climbed
our stick and hung there.
Like a zippered bag crammed
with too many t-shirts.
Stayed put for hours,
just shifting its footing
now and then.

We moved it on to flowers later,
offering cow parsley,
apple blossom, anything
to encourage it to feed,
then in desperation sugared water,
which left sticky pools
on the table top darkened
with wing powder.

The moths didn’t budge.
For hours it clung to the same
flower head, rearranging
itself, pumping fluids
from one body part to another,
growing streamlined,
its wings slicked over its back
and as bright as if
such colours had never
existed till now: this camel
and cream, the black
that in this light, at this angle,
was more a dusky green
lustred with gold—
or was it amber? —the hint
of scarlet underwing

inset like a gusset
that flashed suddenly
into prominence
as the Scarlet Tiger took off
from our jam jar of flowers
on the garden table, circled twice,
landed in the lilac tree,
then made its bid for the sky.

Ruth Sharman