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Mere Literary Festival
2003
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13th - 19th October 2003
Open Competition Winners
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1st. Prize
BOOK MARKS
by Rosie Garner - Basford, Nottingham
And then a canary feather flew out.
Clearly – it didn’t fly but still, the word is right,
a yellow exclamation mark – something living
in the long dead pages of the Congregational hymnal.
I am telling this the wrong way round.
I am at the Wednesday auctions, cavernous, echoing,
children running blind, office chairs and Persian rugs.
There are boxes of baby shoes and cordless phones.
Lot 302 – a dolly tub and a cardboard box.
Inside the tub – a broken hoe, a broom handle,
a bread tin, a commemorative plate – Fifty Years.
And the box is just books.
I can’t see anyone bidding for it.
Practical Gardening,
What Katy Did,
Jane Eyre
How to Live Successfully
The Congregational Hymnal
and I’m prodding the dust under their marriage bed,
I know their names – Alice and Peter Stretton –
I look inside the hymnal and the dust raises tiny tornadoes.
Give Me the Wings of Faith to Rise; Rock of Ages;
Christ the Lord is Risen Today.
The yellow of those canary feathers marking the pages.
and
their kitchen is dark. A wall shadowed window. From
the corner a sleepy rustling, a dash of vivid yellow dips
in the air. Alice squints up at the square of sunshine,
hears the scritch of the hoe between the onions, a
glimpse of his back, bending. Her hands are oiled
with age, she knuckles open the green tin, pulling out
a packet of bread, remembers again that she doesn’t
need the bread knife, and thinks of Peter as a young
man. He’s hurrying along the Lean, brushing past the
loosestrife, meadow sweet, scented rush. He’s
showing her the books he’s bought, they’ll tell each
other again and again how it’s going to be.
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Festival Open Competition – Judged by Dawn Gorman
Dawn Gorman is a poet, short story writer and journalist. Her first poetry collection Looking for gods, was published to great acclaim in 1998, and a further collection is imminent. She has won numerous competitions and awards, including the Wiltshire Libraries poetry competition in 1998. Her work has been widely published in poetry journals and anthologies, and broadcast on radio. Dawn has made several appearances at the Bath Literature Festival and is a member of the Dandelion Poets, a professional poetry performance group who have performed at many literature festivals in the south-west. She also runs Words and Ears, a popular poems and pints event held quarterly at the Dandy Lion pub, Bradford-on-Avon.
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2nd. Prize
BURNING THE MOUNTAIN
by Iris Owens - Abercynon, Wales
At the time of year when the daffodils have turned brown,
We drive past stone houses
With as many steep steps
From pavement to front door
As from kitchen to bedroom,
Bought by young couples,
When old men go into homes,
They stand with blind windows,
Gutted. Entrails of old lead plumbing
Hara-Kiried in the front yard.
From the Star Inn we grind up to Pen Rhys.
Stone-faced Mary, stands over the holy well
Polluted by coke cans.
Down below us Rhondda villages
Spread their arms, like something crucified,
Along the valley floor.
Tylorstown Tip, like a retired collier
With blue scars and a green tinted flat-top,
Rises before us, his number-one hair cut
Bristling in the breeze.
The valley is black.
Disaffected youth with FCUK on their sweaters
Have scorched the earth,
Torched the shallow rooted grass
That was as dry as books in a charity shop.
They have tarnished the silver birches
And turned the Mountain Ash to ashes.
The mountain is flat matt black
Whisps of smoke and crunching cinders
Make a hell-scape.
Opposite The Duke, where the pit was,
They have built a leisure centre.
There, white-haired Evergreens exercise to music,
While boys with burning ambition
Rove the hills with lighters,
Raising fire for a lark.
Where the fire stopped,
A half-burnt hawthorn tree
Froths into flower,
Like Yin and Yan on a stick.
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3rd. Prize
TRIAL BY WATER
by Simon Wood – Pocklington, York
On Scunnerbarrow Brow, so dalesman say,
God struck the rock three times, and water gushed
over the hill’s precipitous rim
into a foaming cleft they call Hell Gill,
a gate between two worlds, and worlds away
from slow deceptive bends and lazy reaches
with soggy banks that need a nine arch bridge
to fetch occasional tractors to the fields.
Beneath the parapet, the Swan’s long garden,
spangled with umbrellas, twists and falls
through flags and ragged rushes to the river.
The pub’s awash with noise, but Daffy Jack,
robbed of his work and wife, his money spent
on Irish, weaves around
familiar tables to a sudden brim,
and in he slips without regret.
Someone is calling time. He doesn’t hear.
His mind is running back to source, and lights
above the bridge are splintering in his eyes.
He drops to icy dark, but spirit numbs him
into a change less troublesome than sleep,
uncaring if he sinks or rises, sinks
or rides a current under grubby suburbs,
where water warm and sticky with emission
fondles him round the jetties out to sea.
He pitches blindly from the river mouth,
where curious hungry seagulls stoop and scream.
Oh blessed spirits, help him now!
With seven doubles spinning in his stomach
he’s gone to meet the God who struck the rock.
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Copyright: Simon Farnfield June 2003 Updated 10/11/03
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