First Prize:
After the calving
we open the byre door onto a dawn discovering itself
and she strides across the ice-brittled yard, scarcely glancing up
as I pack away. Cattle raise their heads as she passes, bellow
recognition, breath billowing in the November air.
Walking up shit-splashed passageways, she slaps
rumps and they part for her, grunting at the offer of silage.
Untethered collies plait themselves around the quad bike
as it grumbles, throaty, in the hardening light.
Unlatching the frost-rimed gate with chapped hands, she’s off,
dogs balancing into the swerve and tilt of the bike.
Sheep stream to her call, shoaling around the ewe nuts
she tips onto the frozen ground carefully one step ahead.
Shaking the sacks to release the last nut she looks across the valley
head full of liveweight gains, grant application deadlines.
Behind her, unfolding over the fell, the sun’s warmth
comes unnoticed, melting the ice pearls stringing wire to post.
Ilse Pedler
Second Prize:
Roughly The Same
A wren weighs roughly the same
as a wedding ring. The first time
he left; my father returned after 2
or 3 weeks with a small blue bowl,
roughly the size of a wren’s nest,
a peace offering for my mother.
One summer I found a wrens’ nest
on a ledge outside my office.
Whenever I opened the door,
the male would panic and shriek
to defend his family. A wren
fledges 2 or 3 weeks after hatching.
The second time my father left,
it was forever. He left his wedding ring
in the small blue bowl. A male wren
may mate with more than one female.
Vanessa Lampert
Third Prize
Bus
At the front, on the top of a green double-decker,
you’re sneaking a look at the rooks on their nests
in the oak trees, and they’re looking back. There’s a buzzard
above, and a pheasant that flies like it yearns to be
roadkill, and meanwhile the ravens are nesting up
high in a pylon that’s buzzing with static.
Now it crawls through a village that’s red-stoned and retro,
and swerves past the cars that are straddling the pavement.
You’re inches from windows of incomers’ bedrooms,
and every so often, the bus hits the edges
of outjutting trees, and the slap of the twigs on
the glass ought to wake the man dozing behind you.
Now it runs by the railway that closed in the sixties,
where foxes and badgers run regular services
out through the brambles and blackthorn and grass.
There’s a view of the hills that you once knew the names of,
a field full of panels all harvesting sunshine,
the rows of black panels all harvesting sunshine.
So it’s onwards and downwards, you’re out of the boondocks
where fifty-year memories warp your perspective,
and into the burbs where the roads are all altered,
with buds on the conker trees going off bang
among ugly big sheds, and where weighty decisions
are made by small chancers who don’t get the bus.
Mark Totterdell
