Wells Festival of Literature
Winning Poems 2008
First Prize 2008
£500
An Armada of Aunties
By Lucy Lepchani
An armada of aunties, floral sails
rippling on swaying hips
appeared out of hot-engine magic-hat cars
and marveled at the sight of each other.
Sporting perennial shampoo-and-sets, and
familiar handbags dangled from
plump elbows; arms curved in mighty hugs,
white scarlet, fuchsia, and orange tips puckered and pecked.
They swooped down on us children like
billowing storm-clouds of flesh
squeezing and measuring, choking us with
gardenia and Eau-de-Cologne vapours
and the dusky pink scent of face-powder.
These soft-dough invincibles
were ballast in my childhood’s fragile hull,
white my brittle parents wrecked every chance
and then each other
on rock after treacherous rock.
A mainstay of earth-mothers in Marks and Spencer cardies,
they bore the glory of our ancestry;
with thighs that could lean great monoliths upright,
the courage to have ridden alongside Boudicca,
the skills to feed the five thousand with
nothing more than handbag mints,
and the wisdom to cleanse us all of sin
with a soft, white, spittle-edged handkerchief.
They brought the future, gift-wrapped
with their tales of ‘good old days’,
unravelled in the songs of our
great-grandmothers
and a Legacy of whispered, secret heirlooms.
Drawing up the map for my future,
they fussed, they flapped, they kissed again
and there, beneath, lay buried treasure:
where every X marked the spot.
Second Prize 2008
Navigating the Night
By Margaret Eddershaw
Waking in the small hours
sleep as slippery as a shoal
he re-lives
his old routine:
leaving home before stars fade
crunch of shingle under waders
father
loading fish-boxes
brother checking the engine
granddad
greasing winches
quick sips of thermos tea
before the clinker-strong trawler
glides
between groynes
ploughs over grey surge.
Bow nosing toward the horizon
his night’s eye checks compass points
store-boxes moored close in
lobster-pots on buoys out further
then his sea-chart memory unfurls
deep water
constellations
crevasses scoring chalk reefs
a shipwreck tilted on seabed pebbles
massive
sandstone clusters
marking the moment to pay out nets
till the swell and rock of his bed
haul sleep aboard once more.
Third Prize 2008
£200
Vivaldi’s Bow
By Margaret Speak
I’ve begun to finger the bow
and imagine those melancholy sighs
which trembled from his lips
on freezing Thursdays in the orphanage.
He had the patience of a cat,
the temper of a wild wind coming up the canal.
He hated most of us but sometimes his head
would be still beneath his red strands of hair.
Once I saw him pluck a swatch, thread it between
the usual horsehair; play a riff, the scales.
We would play as he stalked the rows,
stopped near a girl: she would tremble at her violin.
He’d begin scribbling a piece just for her,
for the next concert. I’d feel nauseous
because it wasn’t me. My playing didn’t excite
though I practised to exhaustion.
There was a turning over of the place
when the bow went missing.
I slipped it into the gap under the marble step
as I scrubbed it with my raw hands.
This my daily chore: my red hands were never
for coaxing true music out of maplewood
and spruce but they could clean and polish
marble fit for Vivaldi’s shoes.
Wyvern Prize 2008
£100
Displaced Persons, 1945
By Stuart Nunn
Shavings smell no different here. Sometimes I
close my eyes
on the
regimented squalor of the huts;
bang nails, plane scraps of deal to drown the misery.
At first he watched as though afraid - and he’d good excuse,
I suspect, after all he’d seen - expecting to be kicked,
or shouted at in the only language I can speak.
But I’m not here, like some, to ill-treat boys,
no matter what they’ve seen - and the ragged uniform
he wears says his innocence has been conscripted.
He says nothing, tries to look as though he’s going
somewhere else. He watches how the curl comes off
the plane, and hangs, and falls. He finds a bag
and without a word arid only a glance at me,
picks up every one. Once, I catch him
as he loops a ringlet round a finger, feels its spring
before he crams it in the sack. I smile. He manages
to
reciprocate as though he’s labelled me
and remembers what smiling feels like.
Day after day he comes, but only when I’m here alone.
I tell him about you, my son, and how, at home, the sun
falls on the workshop steps at this time of year.
There’s a sack of assorted nails and screws. I sit him
on the floor and show him how to sort: nails from screws;
galvanised from brads; round-head from countersunk.
He shows me when he’s done. Each one is laid alternately
head to point, in rows, touching and parallel. He grins,
and this, I realise, says something, either
about the German character, or how when we’re like this,
where things can get no worse, it’s order that we want.
I thank him in the best German I can manage.