POEMS

The three winning poems from our 2024 Open Competition are posted on our Competitions page. In this section of our website, we will be publishing each month one of the highly commended or commended poems from the prize anthology.

The importance of having a broom nearby

I'm not really a royalist – let's get that straight out of the way – but

slightly mesmerised I watched the slow line of humanity

snake through the ancient hall.

Each face changing as they round that last corner at the top of the stairs

look down to where voices of Anne Boleyn, Guy Fawkes, Charles 1

quiver in the quiet and our Queen lies in her coffin.

The queue makes a slow negotiation of steps, thins to single file

as each person stops, bows, cross themselves or just try to be in the moment.

All look slightly numb, faces grey at this new thing to bear.

Every twenty minutes two raps of a ceremonial stick and the queue stops

for the changing of the guard, choreographed, a precise inversion of weapons

to rest on the floor, heads bowed eyes to the ground then the slow metronome walk away,

boots on stone the only sound. I regret not going. Don't have an excuse.

I thought I'd try my own small tribute

(she being the only Queen I'd ever known and remembering how my daughters

thought their Nan and the Queen were the same person)

so, at the next two bangs of the stick I stood

with no weapon to reverse, took a broom just used

to clean up after the builders, stood stock still, sight bend at the waist

right hand over left, eyes downcast.

I'd watched her children do this under the gaze of millions

wondered if they'd rehearsed it.

I thought of Mum and knew I couldn't have done it.

Small sounds echoed in the hall; the shuffle, a baby's cry, a cough, a muffled sob.

A long twenty minutes for the next two knocks on stone. I reversed my broom

slowly lifted my head – neck stiff, pins and needles in my feet.

It was hard.

I looked back at the tv

Bye waved a little boy.

Valerie Bence

Commended

Coercive control

At dusk you strolled towards me

chainsaw sneering in your arms. It woke the owl-chicks

nesting in my upper reaches, appalled

the drowsy air. In orange helmet and goggles,

you swore my lowest branch was dead. I was unstable,

a danger to the young nurtured by my canopy.

I knew you'd never liked that part of me.

How could I stop you? How could I

ever block you once your mind was clear?

After, my tissue exposed, I tried to seal,

grew callus round the edges. You painted my scar,

tenderly with tar, talked

of pouring concrete into the cavity –

a certain way to heal. All the time infection grew,

sprouted in the gash, travelled along my sap

and for a time I lost the green in me.

That month, May it was, you left. I fought, but weakly.

Others fed my shrivelled roots, hugged

my brittle trunk. In time, woundwood grew,

tough, a lignified bandage on my chest,

till once again I closed. Still in leaf

when you came back, you lent against

my spine as if it were a tomb, said how much

you loved me, despite my leathery wound.

Estelle Price

Commended

Enlightenment

She always collected hotel freebies from work trips,

even matchbooks, though she never smoked. Fifty years later

finds one in the bottom of an old suede bag, remembers

that night, the guy in the bar asking for a light, his hand

striking the flame, raising it to their flared golden faces,

her eyes following his stroll to the counter,

return with two glasses, her cheeks burning

with his lingering gaze before he checked his watch,

the cold loneliness of her drink after his leaving.

Tonight she opens the returned book for the first time,

sniffs the scent of old fire, lets her finger trace the neat row,

identical sticks, just one ripped space. Inside the flip top,

swirled bold in blue pen, his room number and name.

Fiona Ritchie Walker

Commended

Paper cut

It is the smallest things that catch me out and

seem to hurt most. I never make a fuss about them

as they seem so inconsequential at the time.

The paper cut, in the whorl of a fingerprint, so narrow that

I can barely find it. Shampoo in the shower will.

So will the gentle press of a finger's pad on the keyboard.

The hangnail that I prise slowly from the quick.

I go just that little too far and leave a throbbing

chevron of redness, raw in the skin at the base of the nail.

Tying shoelaces and fastening buttons will certainly

act as bellows sparking the tiny furnace heat once more.

It wasn't ever the final closing of the door, quietly clicking

behind you, but the fullness of a kiss goodnight becoming

the merest grazes as you rolled over and shut us down.

Steve Lott

Highly Commended

Jacobean Tapestry

You are sewing a map of your soul,

inspired by your mother's kitchen garden

with its tangle of redcurrants, gooseberries,

raspberries, hazelnuts, seasons mingling,

everything moving, fruiting. Lightning flows

from your fingers as you edge roses in electric blue,

embroider oak leaves in the colours of the ocean,

as though each thread is a rope, hauling water

from the well that will put out the fire in your cells,

make you whole again. You are stitching a spell

powerful as the scalpel that scarred your breast,

the x-rays that will wreck your shoulder.

At the garden's heart is something lithe, sinuous,

an olive snake, barred with earth. It slithers

through your dreams, poisoning malignant tissue,

weaving your cracked bones back together.

You are choosing a craft loved by your ancestors,

like the one sewn by your nain, just as her life

began to unravel—have you made a pact with her,

that if you are patient, if you sew for fifty hours,

filling the gaps, keeping the tension even,

that you will redeem yourself, that Atropos

will not snip your thread too soon, so you can raise

your three small children, see them flourish?

You are writing an illuminated manuscript

of swirls, curlicues, that centuries from now will sing

of how, in darkness, out of the pit of your fear,

you grew a tree of life.

Elizabeth Barton

Highly Commended

Unsinkable Sam

Not my real name, of course. I'm Oscar

and you're pleased to meet me. Distinguished,

I swopped sides during the War, allowing no shell,

bomb or torpedo to defeat me.

I served first on the battleship Bismarck, which I thought

a safe posting. I don't make mistakes,

but, water lapping round my ears, I almost

considered forsaking boasting.

Rescued and treated by His Majesty's Ship Cossack,

one of the enemy, I quickly decided (never

being good at the Hitler salute) to recognise

the Royal Navy's hegemony.

Language not being a problem, I began my duties

chasing vermin. I'd hardly settled in

when there was a loud bang, a general alarm, soon

followed by the smell of burning.

Cossack, torpedoed, listed and sank. Undignified,

covered in oil, I lolloped into a lifeboat,

reached Gibraltar and received my next assignment; the un-

sinkable Ark Royal.

You guessed it. She was torpedoed soon after.

If I were a cod, I'd surely spend less time

in water and, short of lives, I resented being called

an old sea dog.

Enough is enough. I opted for shore duties, never

more to roam. Still sharp and an excellent

mouse-catcher, I spent the rest of my life in England

in a retired sailors' home.

Neal Mason

Highly Commended

Note: Oscar graciously consented to sit for his portrait, which he expects you to go and see at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

The Lucky Generation

We few, we happy, blessed, lucky few

were spared the pomp and circumstance of war,

the hobnailed hammer of the bleak tattoo,

the naming of parts and the cannon's roar.

We learnt instead what we believed our due

in arts and science medicine and law,

all free for us to waste or to pursue,

and seldom thought of what such wealth was for.

But as we now book tickets for the stalls,

for trips to exhibitions, galleries,

museums, stately homes and concert halls,

the briefest unwise glance behind us sees

approaching a tumescent, angry swarm

of thunder clouds, outriders of a storm.

Peter Sutton

Highly Commended