Wells Festival of Literature

Winning Poems 2007

First Prize

£500

Judith Green

Cheltenham

 

 

The man with the dachshund under his arm

Your noise doesn’t figure any more,
I don’t tilt my head for a tread on the stairs
like listening to the first patters of rain;

we don’t rush to rescue the washing
from a deluge, undress and
hang out wet clothes on the back of chairs.

We don’t push the sofa to the wall
and dance to Stones’ records
you bought in the Red Cross for a pound,

nor watch the News in bed
holding hands as Barber slows
the fall of towers and, I’ll always

remember this, we see a guy in a trenchcoat
running with his dachshund under his arm,
the cloud behind him.

You wiped my face with the edge of the sheet
and the picture switched to a fireman
crouched on the sidewalk, mourning.

 

 

 

 

 

Second Prize

£200

Christopher Somerville

Bristol


 

Anxious sky

 

 

We watched it from the hill at first light,

the sea eating the marsh. A man told

how he’d heard the bank go in the night,

seen the silver tide lift through the cold

sense of it. I did not say
what tugged like a beak at my inner eye –

how from the marsh path yesterday

in a fretting  wind, under an anxious sky,

I viewed a frantic dance
of gulls in freakish terror over the barrier

and had wondered at it, at what chance

orchestrator, what hawk or what harrier.

 

 

 

 

 

Third Prize

£100

Linda Saunders

Bath

 

 

Saskia Sleeping

Seventeenth-century Dutch? The keeper
reaches down a tall portfolio,
opens its black casements, like a servant
softly letting in the day; white-gloved,
instructs how reverently to slide out
then lift each drawing by the cardboard mount
and set it on the cradle, to receive
our gaze; cautions us never to point,
discussing a detail, lest a finger
so much as threaten to graze the paper.

Or rouse the sleeper?
                                    For there she rests -
from her care’s constancy, his household
and his love. Saskia has dropped off for longer
than she planned, propped on the bolsters, one arm
floated out on the surface of a dream,
the other tucked in to her waist below
the ample bodice, where her fist is curled
on some forgotten task - a key? or self? -
the cocked thumb pointing upwards to her heart.

Such tender knowledge!
                                      He has anchored
her being to a few chaste passages
of the pen, precisely loving at the neck,
cheek and small soft mouth; a few light washes
of the brush - the curtain that throws a shadow
of privacy across eyelids and brow.

From this nap, centuries deep, no kiss
will wake her. But Rembrandt has appointed us
his watch: we stand in his place, seeing,
holding her, with his eyes, his hand, his tact.

 

Wyvern Prize

£100

Stuart Nunn

Chipping Sodbury

 

African landscape with figures

 

You see them first down the long perspective

of motorways, men dwarfed by distance.

Flashing past, no details impinge but a sense

of want that’s driven them out here where

no goal or departure point is evident.

Soon you expect them, walking where you drive,

walking - where to? Where from?
Sometimes two or four, not together,
spaced as though to make some point

in a language you don’t understand.

Later you find a destination or point
of origin in the hillsides of plastic sheeting,

plywood or corrugated tin leaving you

to imagine all the life that’s buried there,

marked off with high walls and safety barriers

 
stopping this other world colliding
with your safe white rush from beauty spot

to national park. Later still, you see them

everywhere, these walking, waiting Africans,

driven to the edges of our perceptions.

They walk through a landscape theirs

by law and ancient practice, but which

they didn’t make. Not strangers, not foreign,

but curious, unreadable, and, like the landscape,

strangely eloquent.

 

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