Winner
'Anam Cara'
by Penelope Thoms
We tell stories from the pieces of our lives,
benchmarks that lead us to each other and away
till finally we return to God and our beginning.
We stop and listen. The children say “Tell us more, tell us how it was
in the days when you were young and remembered everything.”
Smiling in the shadows, we allow our oars to dig deeper.
“I believe it was like this…” and we tell the tale again
as the silent children, fingers trailing in the water,
sense the Other, the larger stillness beyond the owl’s call.
“Did you cry?” one asks. “I seem to remember I did;
but it may have been that I laughed until the tears
came down my cheeks like the water on your fingers.”
And another: “Were you afraid?” “Yes,” I say, “I was afraid then,
but I am afraid no longer.” And the small ones, eyes wide,
watch the pinpoints of light guiding us home.
Highly Commended
'Sully Island'
by Mark Blayney
Yellow diggers on the beach. A cat
picks through stones, ears up
as a car squeaks on the hot road.
In the pub, we gossip about what
the diggers might be doing. The spit
is not dangerous, but the council
has imposed signs that say it is. No
one takes any notice. We head
to the island at low tide, when the path
is exposed. You get three hours, then
you come back. We go because it’s there.
Once, apparently, someone drowned.
We fear a fence. A wall. Jeers. They can’t
build a wall. The metal claws now
have scraped, prodded. Archaeology?
Scoffs. There’s nothing worth having.
In a dark corner, the mitten
some child has forgotten. After twelve
meteors crowd the sky. We see them
through the window. Busy old night,
someone says, raising a pint. The cat
is still there. I stand and wonder and
as the diagonal lights flash, they seem
to bring the diggers to life. We watch
forlorn as they descend and only then
realise what’s going on. They’re digging up
the sea. It folds back on itself
like a magician’s cloth. Underneath
are mice, fish, bird heads, endlessly. .
The cat turns over, dreaming me.
Highly Commended
'Prague'
by Richard Halperin
I was in it once when I was two.
Now I am one, or less than one,
And you somewhere.
I did not know I was two then.
Now I do.
We walked in it then, that Prague, those days.
Fools buy guidebooks.
Better to walk blind in a new place.
Better to hear the stones breathe,
Better to sense the evanescent soul of a place.
There will always have been blood, battles,
Maudlin magnificence, this city or that.
Better to have the thought steal up
Like mildew or massed gold, during Mozart or Kafka,
‘Ah, he had Prague in him, that one.’
I am writing this with a blue pen
And why should you be knowing that?
You are reading this with or without
Your glasses, and who cares, really?
But a day remembers these things,
Cities are coalescences of these things,
One walks through them, one lives in flats in them,
And notices or does not notice a fog
That hangs there.
Persons are also the coalescences of things,
The names are interchangeable. Dublin,
New York, James, Cedric, Margery
Who died horribly, Phyllis who didn’t,
Maudlin magnificence and another cognac,
Waiter, please. I call them all Prague.
Commended
'What her mother told her'
by Karen O'Connor
We said, you could fry an egg on her pole.
Her mother said, washing took the nutrients from her hair.
Our mother said, if that’s what her mother said,
we should respect that.
Which was fine if you didn’t have to sit next to her
the lice leaving in droves
and where else were they going to go
but the nearly clean head next door
and then you’d have your arse leathered
for bringing them into the house,
even the dogs would shun you,
and your head reeking like a Jeyes Fluid factory
bald from the tearing of the fine-tooth comb
the eggs falling on the newspaper by the fire.
If you dared to itch you’d get a clip around the ear
“don’t be drawing unnecessary attention to your head”.
You could feel them burrowing into your scalp, birthing their eggs
in little pockets, like the fox holes the soldiers made during the war.
The nits hatching, breaking under the scalp,
the babies crawling out bawling for their mothers
long dead from the fumes of the Lysol.
And yet, there was that one time, I met her on the train,
years after school and puberty, her hair still dripping.
She milked it as she asked what I was doing.
I could feel my scalp tingle
the first eggs crack beneath the surface
the scrape of the nymphs tongue along my scull.
She was working for a charity, she said,
raising funds for poor and sick children,
and despite myself, my heart broke for her
and what her mother told her.
Commended
'Quantum Connections at Cern'
by Don Nixon
Duality’s a concept much too fine
for me to fully grasp. In the night sky,
flecked with stars that flicker to eternity,
is there perhaps an overall design
that underlies this vast infinity?
Light years away may spin a matching world,
as suns implode, their flash, forever furled
in cyclic waves throughout this orrery.
String theorists suggests that time may bend
through curving lines of synchronicity
attracting worlds of strange duality,
in which a mass of unseen specks may blend.
A mirror universe by us unseen,
God particles in a complex machine.
Shortlisted
'Conservatory'
by Mark Blayney
The pool is a few feet deep but its blackness
makes it infinite. Cautiously, turtles investigate.
They stay on the pier like old bathers
willing to put in the hours. Carp own the water,
their heads nosing out trouble in the miniature ocean.
I kneel by the pool and it’s a seaside, its sandbanks canted,
the rocks and palms signalling the end of harbour.
Upstream a waterfall, and the sound of children playing.
Standing, perception alters and the girls
regard me uncertainly. One looks a little like you.
I think of your Russian dolls. Do you still have them?
The water wants to lap toes. There’s a glow at my feet.
It’s my phone, flashing a message. Instinctively I touch my pocket;
it must have dropped out while I knelt. The carp loom,
sharks disguised with cartoon outfits. The message is not from you.
A turtle crawls on top of another, perhaps to make love,
perhaps just because it’s a turtle, crawling on top
of another turtle. They wobble and fall into the water.
I’m not sure which of the three of us is more surprised.
The café is in the roof. I look down through a plastic globe.
I ask for a cake and a boy pushes tongs through a grille.
This one? he asks, waving the tongs above the only cake.
I walk round the globe and sit at the furthest table. My phone
bleeps. I must have dozed because I thought
that to reach the bathrooms you climb a narrow plastic
ladder into a roof, transparent, through which you look down
and see the pool below, then the waterfall, then the café.
Leaving the money for the cake then remembering
that I paid when I bought it, I take the path to the rose garden.
I call but you don’t answer. I’m glad you’re allowed
your own phone. I couldn’t listen any more to that distant, tinny voice
who used to love me, telling me she was unavailable.
Tomorrow we go for the settlement. I don’t know when,
or how often, I will see you again. My friends say
to be upbeat. Wear a suit. Do not let the mask slip.
Carp in the bedroom mirror. They swim the blue wall,
their clown outfits splitting to reveal demons. Four am.
Speed it up, I say out loud. Get to the day. Please, get to the day.
Shortlisted
'Rana Arborea'
by Susi Clare
You can just make him out -
his shape, his dorsal skin almost
a precious stone, smooth, bright.
He sits quietly puffing out
his small breaths at the edge
of the pond by the willows.
He’s caught in a column of light
from a moon sagging to full –
trees become ink stains,
cobwebs etched on black,
each flower stalk long-necked
and sharp – until movement
breaks the surface of the water,
a trout heaves up, stealing silver,
and the frog jumps back
into just another leaf.
Shortlisted
'Pay-back'
by Susi Clare
It’s a typical summer’s day, a narcotic
kind of white with teenage menace
simmering in the ’hood. Today
he’s getting even - an eye for an eye –
vowels slick as bullets.
He’s had it with jeers and loser jokes
and today he’s going to make
himself a hero.
He’ll wait for them where
the railway arches peter
like serrated teeth to nothing,
which is what they’ll be
when they exit the garage.
He’ll have women too
when he’s famous,
his personal gang of fans
getting off on adoration
for their diamond geezer.
He’ll even write a book.
He checks his shot-up ma has finally
O-Ded, and lets the pit bull loose
for when his pa staggers home.
He picks up the Kalashnikov
he got with his ma’s methadone.
The barrel is smooth, tight and shiny,
just like the burnt skin on his face.
Shortlisted
'The Farmer’s Wife'
by Doireann ni Ghriofa
Soft muck mulch squelched under boot as we walked,
Hand in hand along a path pitted by hoof prints,
Splashing through puddles of moonlight that stretched before us,
Like an avenue of silver cobblestones. We pushed
The red rusted gate, almost tasting its scent of metal blood.
Through whispering tunnels of trees, we walked together
Branches and thick vines of ivy entwined overhead like fingers,
Knotted to the knuckle. Climbing over the hill, we gasped, breathless
At your shining kingdom of bogs and boreens. You spread
Your beloved before me, a shy body on a patchwork quilt:
Meandering walls bordering small, wet fields
Like stony veins that throbbed with your ancient blood.
We paused at a rough pile of rocks where the old farmhouse
Once stood, swallowed now by rushes and ragwort
Some stones still standing, like bleached skulls
Covered in sparse lichen moss. We joked
That this savage land would consume us too.
The moon stooped and bent her face to gaze at us,
In our tight lovers’ embrace, as I stared at the new ring
That sat on my finger like a fallen star. That tiny diamond,
The first rock that anchored me to this land.
Each year, each child since, has added another #d7d7d7 rock
Creating a towering cairn to entomb me.
No-one stops to ask what lies inside these stacked stone walls.
I know. Only skeletons of stillborn infants, and
An old woman’s dead dreams. I lie awake, searching
For constellations in the starscape of black mould that speckles
The ceiling of our bedroom. Next to me,
His snarling snore echoes, as the land draws ragged breath
Through him. He is the land, as the land is him, and I,
I am anchored to both, and will be until I die.
And oh! To think of how we laughed that this savage land
Might one day consume us all… How we laughed.
Shortlisted
'Sunday Morning'
by Richard Halperin
I take
the first steps of this poem not knowing where
it is going. I am breathing
and not knowing where that is leading except to
more breathing. The pen goes forward
and I see green cattle, New York skyscrapers,
métros and tubes, recriminations over the breakfast table,
Mahler and Mozart and other divine farewellers,
lakes in Wicklow and no narrative thread. I light
a candle with a match and relate more to the match
than to the candle. It’s the same as the
candle but quicker.
I heard a poet in Bantry once
read a poem that wasn’t a poem,
it was about a favourite writer of his father’s,
the poet talked about why his father loved that writer’s writing
and in the room was boy father writer
(Jules Verne if the truth be told)
and the love of them,
and those three minutes were the match
and I crushed oh God the soft deep black ash
of the tip of it between my thumb
and forefinger and the feel of that between
the ridges of my skin felt righter than
anywhere to go.
Why do you use so many ands? They’re a crutch.
That’s why.
Shortlisted
'Flight at tide’s turning'
by Alwyn Marriage
As our oars dipped
into the shimmering syrup
of evening slack water,
swallows appeared,
dancing, chattering,
flittering round us like dust,
swooping to meet gnats on the wing
and carry them who knows where.
As they passed, countless more
flooded round the boat,
appearing playful but intent
on serious business, bent
on following the ribbon of the estuary
to where it flips westward,
then rising effortlessly over fields,
like iron filings drawn towards the south
where Africa beckons.
For half an hour
we leant in silence on our oars
intoxicated by the magical stream of lighter than air
movement. September half gone, the western sky
turning to ever-deeper blush, promising that summer
is not quite over, despite the desperate migration
whisking round our heads.
The tide hangs in the balance
between sorrow at seeing summer fly away
and wonder that for one magical evening
we not only witnessed, but were swept up into
such a sweet sour miracle.
Slowly their absence fills the air and as they fade from sight
night swallows us while flocks of birds fly on towards the light.
Shortlisted
'Discus thrower'
by Don Nixon
They crowned me with the victor’s laurel wreath,
my naked body streaming oil and sweat,
the mud streaked discus lying at my feet.
Beyond, the summit of Olympus towered,
bird sharp in outline, flat against the sky.
The sculptor Myron begged for me to pose.
What greater honour could the gods bestow
than immortality through sacred art?
The discus pose was difficult to hold,
my tired muscles cramping as I bent.
He steadied me with mottled toad brown hands.
I flinched as I breathed in his old man stench
and sensed the lust he could no longer feel,
a flash of Pan delirium in his eyes.
Insistent clay caked fingers forced my limbs
to form the angles of the golden mean,
so that the line of beauty curve was set.
Cast from the molten mold, I am reborn,
no longer human, almost demi-god.
The light plays on the patina to define
the tension in my outstretched throwing arm
and power in the tapered bulging calf,
a perfect movement frozen for all time.
Ideal depiction of the human form,
embodiment of all that Plato dreamed.
Bronze statues rust into green flaking dust
and our immortal deities will die.
What may survive these remnants of our time
is an ideal to which men will aspire,
a richer gift than any painted vase
or figured fragments from a temple frieze.
A world that men may sometimes glimpse
through focused lenses in an artist’s eyes
or siren sounding in a poet’s voice.
[ Myron was the sculptor of the bronze Discus Thrower statue ]
Shortlisted
'The Dead Wife Speaks'
by Michael Swan
He’s yours now.
I hold no grudge.
You can give him
what I never did.
I was no housekeeper,
no companion,
no neighbour to his neighbours,
no daughter to his mother,
no wife to him.
Downstairs, where people come
you have removed all trace.
But why have you left so many of my little things
in the room at the top where nobody goes?
My prints
my poetry
my herbals
my Russian dolls.
If you had thrown my things into a skip
or taken them to a charity shop
or made a bonfire and danced round screaming
it would have been better.
But dancing round screaming? Not your style.
And why bother?
In life I was unimportant.
No threat
through all those years
when you waited quietly for me to go.
And in death
still no threat.
So you leave me
to drift sadly
up here among my little things.
Not worth a dustpan and brush.
Woman,
I am dead.
Let me go.
Shortlisted
'Dolls'
by Michael Swan
On the suitcase
behind glass
in the museum:
‘Judith Levy
6.4.1936’
Judith packed her case herself.
On top
she made a little bed
for Susi.
She took care of Susi
right through the journey.
Curiously enough
the woman who took Susi away
and beat Judith
and pushed her into the queue –
when she was small
she had a doll called Susi, too.
She took her on holiday
one summer
to the Starnbergersee.
Dolls don’t mean a bloody thing.
