THE WARE POETS

1st Prize

VILLA DI NEREZZA
Michael Henry


Black will have black:
the colour of bad luck;

the Romany dog shooed into your path
that got caught in the wheels of your car,

the colour of suspicious clothes -
the beautiful taffeta cape with tiny black bobbles
that graced the shoulders of little contessas
for two hundred years or more -

that cape laid as a gift round the shoulders
of your daughter's lavender dress;

the colour of crêpe-framed portraits
of the dead children who'd worn it
in the Wunderkammer
in the Villa di Nerezza;

the ink of the poet writing for his dead children
and the notes of the music of the composer
setting his Kindertotenlieder;

the inside of the glove compartment where the cape was secreted
over the wheels of your car the dog was caught up in.

Black will have black:
the colour of bad luck,

and that silk talisman you laid at the cemetery,
and the blood of the Gypsy dog crusting dry.



2nd Prize

JASMINE
Nigel Lawrence

It always comes back to me
on nights when the cool air outside

slips in like a cat under the curtains,
lifting and tightening my skin,

then exits with a trace of lemon oil
and I roll over into the emptiness,

feel everything slacken again
as the heat comes, folds its fingers

around my lungs, leaving me drowning
until the next return of those pale white buds

dripping onto my skin, one by one,
each raising its separate blister of longing.



3rd Prize

STORAGE
Wendy Klein

Imagine, if you can, a vessel; the size of an amphora jug;
imagine its curved surface, imposing and erect.
Then reach out and touch it - trace the spidery cracks,
feel the terracotta, rough and faded, but still warm -
warm with the warmth of real sun, Mediterranean sun,
not its distant Northern cousin, faded and anaemic.

Imagine this amphora as a gift;
a gift from the sea, from the world's essence -
omphalos, the navel, the centre of all life.
Imagine just finding it there one morning -
wondering how it got there;
wondering what it meant.

Imagine the moment when you realise what to do with it -
when peering into its musty depths, breathing in antiquity:
nymphs and satyrs cavorting in wine-soaked bacchanal,
gods and goddesses and gods and mortals in ecstatic union,
golden grain and golden oil, and sharp yellow wine;
imagine how you would know - know precisely what to do with it.

Imagine the growing knowledge of the gift given,
your hand reaching down and down and down,
exploring in stately finger steps, the steep dark sides,
moistened by, intimate with so many substances, and stirred by
the crazy rocking of ships, the battle cries of pain and wrath,
the babble of market days, coarse and insouciant.

Then imagine the invitation, both tacit and sly, to find a use for it:
to store away your shame, to store away the memory of living things
you may have killed: through failure to please; through needing
their love too much; through fear, neglect, suffocation -
or a combination of the three - through listening to bad advice;
through careless words; careless deeds:

your grandfather; your first cat; that potted heather plant,
sinless and unsuspecting, an unwelcome gift at an inauspicious time;
at least one unborn baby; the planet, through profligate waste,
that Acer bush, shrivelling overnight from burgundy to rust -
mysteriously - a litter of puppies (all but one), the odd lover;
the odd husband; the trust of a child.

But how would it all fit in? And how would you know:
what should go first, what should go last, and
what, in the end, you might just leave out?



Joint 4th Prize

A FEW WORDS ABOUT CHICKENS
Lara Frankena

Inside the chicken is another chicken that wants to sing. Despite the seed scattered
on the ground, the hawk overhead, despite the fox circling the henhouse or the
darkness of the hour, the chicken inside the chicken fills the chicken's beak with
song.

					* * * 

The dog inside the chicken wants to bark. Sometimes it hears something like a
hand on the doorknob, rattling the door. Sometimes it is a hand. Sometimes it is
wind. The dog inside the chicken feels a familiar rumble in his throat. Wind.
Hand. Door. The dog inside the chicken barks.

					* * * 

There are too many fences for the wolf inside the chicken. The wolf inside the
chicken remembers drinking at flowing streams, at ponds laced with newly-
formed ice. The wolf inside the chicken remembers rain that turned to hail, hail
that melted in tiny puddles on the ground. The wolf inside the chicken licked dew
from morning leaves. He cannot bend over a tin water bowl choked with feathers.
The wolf howls.

					* * * 

The rooster wakes.



Joint 4th Prize

BRIDGES
Terence Reid


They come suspended, cantilevered, arched
or woven out of sisal, stitched and tied.
Across stone bridges, ancient armies marched
to conquer, colonise the other side.
From modest wooden structures crossing streams
to Roman aqueducts built gracefully:
from bridges spanning rivers and ravines
to bridge-linked islands in the open sea.
Such bridges, spanning water, road and rail,
hold no secrets, are open to the sky,
unlike the humpbacked covered-way to jail
that men passed through to prison or to die -
echo chamber of long-forgotten cries,
that via doloroso, Bridge of Sighs.


4th Prize

THEATRE OF WAR: SUMMER 1940
Gavin Stewart

They would come through the long light
like puppyish sprites, with a plink of a bike bell,
a scuffle of boots;
and we,
for this moment, were damsels demure, and would hide
in our huts, blush in the darkness,
shushing our giggles and hammering hearts.

So they played to the silence (to our ears by the doors)
and crooned to the moon: This is Radio Love.
Their voices a programme of the heartiest hopes
as they joined in the songs they'd learnt in the mess.

But they also concocted more elaborate schemes.
I remember that evening when they declaimed
A Midsummer Night's Dream from start to finish;
grammar school boys, freed for a time
from the strangled lines of Foxtrot Tango.

We would only appear when our faeries had gone;
to stroll in the quiet that they'd left in the dark;
to throw back the shutters and sleep with the night.

In the morning, our stage
the edge of their field.


Redwing Sonnet Prize

PAINTING THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE
Jeremy Kingston

1. Musea voor Schone Kunsten

About suffering they told bloody lies,
the Old Masters: oh, they could always paint
dogs scrapping in a corner while the saint
down in the foreground elegantly dies;
life carries on regardless: big surprise.
It's the main subject pushes my complaint,
the martyr's decorous, demure restraint
while spears jab, arrows ping and hot oil fries.

In Memling's St Sebastian note how
the languorous youth reclines against his tree;
though five times punctured, nothing's going to start
the faintest frown rippling along that brow:
sweet poses, prettifying sanctity,
turn crimes to candy in the name of art.

2. Galleria degli Uffizi

Caravaggio gets it right, of course;
not for him the blithe denial of pain;
when a boy's told he's going to be slain
because some god wills it he'll scream himself hoarse;
he'll fight and fight against the manic force
of this crazed old man; arms and shoulders strain
to shake his grip and be free, yet in vain
till the ram appears from a thicket of gorse.

There's an angel staying the killer's hand
and a jolly fine church up on a hill
but what you remember is the weird frown
of the interrupted Abraham, and
young Isaac with his head twisted, held down
and even at the knife's point screaming still.


*   Memling's Martyrdom of St Sebastian is in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels
    Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Isaac is in the Uffizi


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