Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2024
The following prizewinning poems were chosen by our 2024 judges, Jane Yeh & Glyn Maxwell (see poems & judges’ reports below):
- First Prize, £2,000, Poem About Love, Imogen Wade, Great Bookham, Surrey
- Second Prize, £1000, Variations on a Line in Psalms, Weijia Pan, Oakland CA
- Third Prize, £500, Mazes, Victoria Korth, Rochester NY
Commended poems:
- Fennec, Alexandra Melville, London
- Home/Time, Anna Woodford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
- Intervention, Anthony Lawrence, Winnum, Queensland
- Having a go, Beatrice Garland, London
- Shut out, Christopher M James, Tamnies, France
- To the unmoored body beneath, Emma Reilly, Sykesville MD
- Imagine the James Dean Ballet Opens in a Fairmount, Indiana, Corn Field, Hilary McDaniel, Albuquerque NM
- I was called Sarah Lloyd, I Patterson, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
- The Table, Kerry Darbishire, Kendal, Cumbria
- The heart bird, Lindsey Forster-Holland, Ormskirk, Lancashire
- Frequent Flyers, Lynn Foote, London
- New evidence of hummingbirds, Mark Fiddes, London
- Bayt, Mary-Jane Holmes, Barnard Castle, County Durham
- A thesis on emptiness, Michelle Brooks, London
- Broken, Mike Schneider, Pittsburgh PA
- Catfish, Rency Raquid, Oxford
- The heron, Richard Meier, London
- Daughter Country, Rosie Jackson, Teignmouth, Devon
- Springtime in Paradise, Sean Swallow, Pwllheli, Gwynedd
- A passenger’s commentary on a journey from Shanghai to Zhoushan, an island on the East coast of The Peoples Republic of China, via Hang Zhou Bay Bridge: a reminder for The Driver — 24 June 2023, Wyn Jenkins, Flint, Flintshire
2024 judges’ reports
Jane Yeh writes…
It was an honour and a pleasure to be a judge for the Troubadour International Poetry Prize this year. In reading the entries, I was delighted by the range of subjects and forms used — by which I mean ‘form’ in the widest sense, in terms of line lengths and enjambments, stanza breaks, layout, and so forth. There were poems inspired by current events, political issues, and international conflicts, as well as poems about the most everyday of subjects, like a dining-room table, or making a fish curry. And there were some poems that seemed to be about one thing but were really about another.
Before I move on to congratulating the prize winners and commended poets, I just wanted to offer my sympathies to those who weren’t chosen, or even to those commended who were disappointed not to win one of the top 3 prizes. I can certainly commiserate with you, as I used to enter the big poetry competitions year after year, with only a very occasional minor success. Winning a competition takes not just talent but a bit of luck, in my opinion — it ultimately depends on the judges’ individual tastes and their ability to agree on a group of winning poems. So don’t feel too bad if you didn’t make it this year, and best of luck with any future entries or submissions.
I’ll just finish with a few words of praise for the top 3 prize winners. The 3rd-place poem, ‘Mazes’, was a delicate elegy for a brother that won me over with its skilful use of the free-verse line. I was especially impressed by the second half of the poem, which consisted of 2 long sentences stretched across 12 lines, which to me embodied on the page the very image of a Greek labyrinth described in its lines: ‘the narrow way that led me back after decades’, etc.
I found the 2nd-place poem, ‘Variations on a Line in Psalms’, incredibly compelling and intriguing, with its torrent of unusual, oblique images. I kept rereading the poem to try to piece together a narrative, which was probably the wrong approach — but the rereading kept rewarding me with admiration for the poem’s evocative imagery and tone. Just as an example, one of my favourite lines was: ‘Trees will appear in back alleys like bullies’.
Finally, the 1st-place poem, ‘Poem About Love’, was a clear winner for me, with its sophisticated voice and compelling lines. From start to finish, the writer didn’t put a foot wrong. The poem was consistently surprising right from the off — the title declares it’s about love, but the opening lines talk about a bad smell like when ‘you can’t get your hands clean’, and then the poem keeps moving on to other strange statements and ominous images — ‘No matter the time, someone was dying’, or ‘Death assembled itself like a court case’. I thought this poem was a real tour de force of originality, and I look forward to more work from Imogen in future. Congratulations to everybody!
Glyn Maxwell writes…
I enjoyed the process immensely, judging this honoured prize, and I was so glad to be reunited with Jane, my fellow-judge from the last time.
When I judge a large prize like this, I notice the same phenomenon as the reading rolls along. The poems that don’t work begin to converge in one area of my mind, where form means little and content everything. By the end of the process I feel these poems are emanating from one single consciousness — perhaps a splendid human being, a genius in another field, but one who has learned no craft in this craft. I don’t think anyone interested enough to be reading this report would fall into that category, and there were plenty of fine poems that didn’t make it to the final lists — perhaps the ending didn’t land, or the poem ran out of road, one obscurity too many. But form will find you out, and these were the poems that shone.
Many poems were what I call Poems of Breaking News, along with all the usual breaking hearts and lost dreams. Nothing wrong with writing those, but I think, since around Covid, we poets have been finding that a line about the personal can suddenly turn into a line about the local, the national, the global, the spiritual, and so it seemed here.
Our 1st Prize, Imogen Wade’s ‘Poem About Love’, is a heartfelt revelation of a poem, making its Dantean ascent from filth and torment, through the purgatorial facing of Death, that ‘assembled itself like a court case’ to, if not to heaven, at least towards a glimpse of the love there was, still alive beyond. The journey manages to be both physically exact and psychologically acute, and the meeting of these paths is what fills the poem with light. 2nd Prize, Weijia Pan’s ‘Variations on a Line in Psalms’, is the kind of bewildering arrow-shower the modern day won’t stop bringing down upon us, but it’s rarely done as well as this. The broken connections and hallucinations, both apocalyptic and everyday, rain down towards the last thing we expected: an astonishingly hopeful outcome, from Psalms to Revelation in a way we only dream of. ‘Mazes’ by Victoria Korth, the 3rd Prizewinner, has more of a Greek mythic feel, not just in the word at the outset, which lights the light, but in the sense of life and death spiralling, doomscrolling through space and time towards a fateful and unforgettable vision, the sister and brother held forever in a memory while forever sundered.
2024’s Winning Poems
__________________________________
First Prize, £2,000
Poem About Love
There was something about it that I couldn’t handle.
The smell of it was like when you’ve got sticky fingers
and you can’t get your hands clean and it makes you
want to kill yourself. It smelt the way that feels —
it clung to me, is clinging still. There was an analogue
clock on the wall, which scared him. He didn’t know
early from late. I never went in at midnight, wondered
if the lights stayed the same. Their chemical cleans
could cover but not remove the smell of excrement —
which made it worse somehow, the way a dead body
looks deader beneath a sheet. No matter the time,
someone was dying. And I put my hand on his cheek,
but nothing could keep him. I thought — this man used
to be a child. Death assembled itself like a court case,
bound by the most universal law. I wouldn’t be able to
talk with him anymore; ask his advice, hear him say
such mind-blowing things. That was almost done, and
done forever. I realised that soon he wouldn’t be able
to lift his hands; by next month, he wouldn’t have
hands, not even dead ones. Stacks of blank envelopes
were already gathering dust in my house. If my life
was a body, a hack surgeon was cutting an organ out —
theoretically non-essential, but it felt like my heart.
Imogen Wade
____________
Second Prize, £1000
Variations on a Line in Psalms
Hear my prayer: all earthly flesh will come to you:
A kangaroo licking its black tongue into your veins.
A pamphlet titled “Impossible Friendships” falls
as you open your mailbox, and slits your left thumb.
A bear, his face pawed, will ask for a dictionary.
Those who died in the Arctic will sleep, their bodies
stacked up, waiting for the thaw. Even a girl
who curled eyelashes with extinguished matches
will come for your cash, read to your sleepy dog
until the sun goes out. Recent and distant fears
will engulf you. Trees will appear in back alleys
like bullies — between rain and rickshaws
each leaf a sentinel, frisking a child’s nostalgia
who will come crying, and in its pool of tears
a moon, which will come to you also, come, come,
as a hummingbird rests; in ruins a nation is born.
Weijia Pan
____________
Third Prize, £500
Mazes
Today I read six tourists died in Greece;
one, a doctor, gone out for a dawn trek
found at noon on a rosemary-scented track;
another, a young father, fallen behind
desiccated ruins; two women at once,
good friends and companions, shocking
dehydration beneath the turquoise bowl
of a cloudless sky; two as yet unidentified.
On a day I wish to speak to you this seems
meaningful, thoughts eddying, flowing
in reverse, a cool undertow.
Perhaps how it is after someone dies,
feelings too unique, too particular to share.
How had I forgotten the strange excitement
coming home from school as a young child,
coming to you, fluttering with freedom,
our private language laced with your deep
silences, your hiddenness, and the narrow way
that led me back after decades, winding
toward detritus and treasure, guitars,
blank notebooks, lighters and an onyx ring,
your ruined body, beast-plagued in the dusk.
I made it out, my brother, made it home,
yet find you and I held like light twine,
and my lamp unlit in this maze, blinding.
Victoria Korth
____________
2024’s Commended Poems
Fennec
I’ll be fine in the desert. I was raised
by books and learned to love
a blank space. To look for signs:
the skittering of beetles,
the faint alphabet of a gecko
sketching its path. I know how to live wanting
water and swallowing grit.
There’s sand beneath everything you say.
I’ve grown large-eared, straining
to catch the hint of a dune on the march.
I heard grief brings company
and it made me wish for your death.
A mirage is a well I can never see myself in.
I throw away my looks on its tarry stare
like a backwards narcissus:
petals thrust head-first into hot earth,
humiliated roots splayed in the air.
Heat is a kind of time wasted in the body.
I could become really good
at whistling out here.
At last, the fennecs emerge into night,
tumbling out of sleep in packs.
If I lie on my back, I won’t be so alone:
the stars laugh at me with their blue teeth.
What it must be to be adored!
Alexandra Melville
____________
Home/Time
How my son is is is five
minutes and four decades ago
was me. How he is now and ever
shall be on this golden afternoon
gathering conkers from an old tree.
How we stop look listen all the way
home home to Mum. How I carry him.
How Mum cannot open the door enough.
How she grabs our things as if against
a big lit clock. How her pinny is
all frills and no yoke, her fingers,
chocolate. How she drops
to her hunkers before my son
and send me to my room, to write this.
How Tiny Tears has chickenpox and Grease
is scratched. How the heart shaped hook
cries out for my poncho. How Peppa Pig
has got in and is stamping her boots
on the duvet. How Mum shushes my son
as they dance around me. How everything is
turning — And How! — at the window.
Anna Woodford
____________
Intervention
When I wrote Capercaillie, Capernaum appeared in its place.
I typed the word again, and again
the name of the town
where Jesus had followed his own shadow
replaced an endangered, enigmatic bird. I wrote aromatic,
to infer the pine resin-scent of air
where capercaillies
map the outer limits of their distribution,
but Aramaic shivered into view. When I typed nuclear,
having traced its pre–Cold War
meaning to centre,
Judea materialised, as did Galilee, like a blood-
stain when Luminol is applied to the scene of a crime.
If things had seemed unclear
as I tried to bring
a bird back from the brink, I was now under
no misconception that intervention, divine or otherwise,
had pinioned any chance
of finding it flourishing
this side of an Endangered Species list
and had painted wings on God using muddy pigments
and a moulting brush. Instead
of tracking a bird
through the remains of its habitat, I found
myself repeating words that might or might not
have been earmarked for memorial.
I unsleeved Gorecki’s
Symphony no.3, placed it on the turntable,
lowered the stylus, adjusted the volume to a level
commensurate with acceptance
of defeat or denial,
and waited for the dark, the dark
groundswell of cellos and aria.
Anthony Lawrence
____________
Having a go
You’re slipping beneath the rope,
gone from your ringside seat —
you’re a numero waiting your turn
now that you’re one of the troupe.
So who are you going to be?
A nattily-overalled ringhand,
dragging the waterproofs out for the custard pies,
the buckets of whitewash, pots of tea?
Or that dangerous blonde in studs and white leather,
ruling the horses with a flick of her delicate whip,
forcing them onto their bended knees?
Isn’t that what you’d like? What, never?
Or the clown with his tragical-comical sighs,
mocking the Ringmaster, making us laugh?
No, you want lurex, sequins and spangles,
a corsetiere to show off your fabulous thighs
as you drop the cloak in a shimmering pile
and begin the vertical climb to the wire.
Now you’re the star. Yes, you’re scared — but
you’re lit by that single spot, while
the crowd is hushed and everyone waits
as you balance aloft and the drums roll
for the dazzling double-back somersault…
and hurrah! They leap to their feet!
Now you’re the girl that’s in with the lions,
the one that jokes with the clowns,
the Ringmaster’s pet. But as usual
it isn’t enough. You’re after that juggler, eyeing
his saturnine charms. Now see how the story goes:
night after night in the caravan park
you’ll boil up the pasta, sew back his buttons,
lay out his gear. Wipe snot from the baby’s nose.
Beatrice Garland
____________
Shut out
A familiar click behind me
releasing a neat, trite silence.
My palms molest my back pockets
in two seconds flat. I’m swept along,
a stampede of conjectures,
as if I have a condition. Manic.
My forever rushing always leaves
half of me behind: a split personality
diagnosed here by a door. The door
has a mind of its own, a resolve
to match mine, and now over the phone
some god of a locksmith will quibble
about an urgent divine intervention.
By chance, an elderly neighbour
saves the day, poking acetate sheets
along the door’s fine edge. At some point,
air takes its foot away. Panting, he gathers
his X-ray prints. So many of them.
I enter, wondering what else
I never knew about him.
Christopher M James
____________
To the unmoored body beneath
after Kim Addonzio
I know how you covered the wide bruise with concealer
and split your shins on the road of aftermath how you drank
yourself into a wide dark cave that flooded at high tide
ran through the center of the street on the long walk home
terrified of the shadows in the bushes certain an accident
would be quicker how you gasped awake alone wasted
away learned to cook dreamed of war plotted revenge
feigned politeness to women with shark-teeth & smiled
as you passed them on the street floated naked in water
the temperature of air told a friend the story let them justify
what ruined you then became what ruined you considered
how the shower water would wash away the blood drank red
wine instead how you kissed a girl at the bar went on a date
gave up on dating kissed a boy & threw up in his bathroom left
without saying goodbye forgot the anniversary felt it anyways
passed the sharks on the street and bared your teeth became
something new again bioluminescent & gleaming in the moon-
light hiked up a mountain to watch the sun rise rode a bike
and went nowhere punched the steering wheel to know
what it felt like sat on the porch read a book waited for someone
to save you learned no one else could / listen I love you please keep climbing
Emma Reilly
____________
Imagine the James Dean Ballet Opens in a Fairmount, Indiana, Corn Field
Commuting across heartland Highway-26 imagine
James Dean, that blue-eyed boy, in cornfields, but you are late
to a dance rehearsal and pull into a drive-through. Now,
Mr. Death, how do you like your burger? Cows graze
near Gas City and oil flares shoot skyward. An early winter
sun sets red. In that conservative land of Cole and Hoegy,
like a dancer twirling backwards in a home movie. Prophecy.
As stars rise and cicadas ripple on the return drive, you witness
James’ large head opening as a stage. The ghost of his mother
and other leading ladies appear there, in sheer dance dresses,
stretching thin arms en haut. The whole story plays out
on that land. James would have loved to dance again,
with Eartha Kitt, portraying Pier, who had killed herself.
This living tomb, a barnyard crypt. Sing down the moon.
Hilary McDaniel
____________
i was called sarah lloyd
i was called sarah i braided bunned and
pinned my dark hair pulled myself into long itchy
petticoats black woollen dresses crisp servants’
aprons turned my back on the girls when they
tied them on i wore stiff leathery ankle boots
hooked tight over thick woollen stockings with a
wooden handled boot hook i stole rings to
hide in my pocket i would go into the empty back
lane beggarticks sticktights sweethearts
burdock would cling to my dress nettles would
sting my ankles i walked in the silence always
looked down felt eyes in the windows of
the warehouses storehouses workshops fitters
second hand furniture dealers and strippers
once i climbed up to meadowsweet hill where
the strong wind hugged me as hard as a man
i said nothing up there just stood so still
looking over the town
I Patterson
____________
The Table
Fifty-three years ago postponed until now. A simple word… table
suddenly displaced by a saturation of sound, the dent of an eye
bringing into focus my mother, elbows off, as she laid out her floral cups
to each corner like a grand plan. Making everything go round
while she went without. A raft on wet days drifting through islands,
a feast on birthdays when it seemed nothing, all of us crammed together
like birds to seed, to its newness, calm ocean of conversation
over lamb stew after school. Now each tempered mark, each voice —
distant vowels echo louder than rain on the roof – a fist fall through the once
able centre of its grain that became unstable, storm-rough, flawed
by chisel, hammer, leaking vases, coffee, fag burns, ink, and magic tricks
in evenings of chemistry — my brother’s inventions to change the world.
As light fails and spills another darkness, I push through old waves
of his anger, gin and rum — Dad trying to wipe clean, polish out the steer
of his tongue, the day I almost slipped from its shifting surface, uneasy knots,
the stain of that Autumn when he left us, trying to hold on.
Kerry Darbishire
____________
The Heart Bird
If there was happiness this from thirteen hours of footage
a single clip canoeing through mangroves on Koh Phra Thong
pulled by the Andaman Sea which slides inland coils around roots
that half an hour earlier were dry the tide so low we’d been wedged
on a sandbar waiting for the turn He’s behind the camera not
in the film but I’m at the front of the canoe hair piled up
brunette shoulders smothered in Factor 50 glistening
a white vest over my bikini the halter-neck tickling my nape
as I twist to point at flickers ghosting birds long tail feathers
shaped like spoons — later I’ll look them up and learn the name
Racket-tailed drongo — and behind me his sandaled feet shins with strips
where hair wouldn’t grow knees pale as polished marble so
cuppable a poncho across his thighs covering our extra lenses
and thank Whatever God that this is in my life how effortless it is
to slide into jungle and not feel alien As though the mangrove inhales
and sucks us softly in I’m tender with the oars they cause hardly
a murmur but still the sound rumours through the canopy It’s
a dream to breathe this place touch its unravelled green water
and raise my camera photos of a Hornbill mudskippers azure birds
that rupture into flight He catches none focusing instead
on me through the viewfinder his presence stamped
all over the footage Even now watching the film
I sense him behind me Near the end
a kerfuffle erupts in the undergrowth He misses it but I see
a scarlet wing flap like a banner then gone It pains me now
that I can’t describe the head the plumage of the chest
and I’ll never put a scientific name to that bird But if there was happiness
this this peripheral phoenix this love.
Lindsey Forster-Holland
____________
Frequent Flyers
Here are the relatives, polite and nervous,
hovering by the two-sofa meeting room,
the box of paper hankies; the Co-ordinator,
bearded and glassed, with his gay badge,
saying it’s better to talk away from the corridor.
Here am I, saying sorry, so sorry, of course,
as I gather up my iPad and cranberry juice.
It’s heading for snow outside and my battery
is low. I recharge it from one of ten red sockets.
It’s a shit-show, says the woman with a dodgy heart.
We’re here darling, says the HCA who proceeds
to tell me about dyke bars she used to go to in Soho.
Here the pinging O2 and the rusty radiator —
the opaque window of your isolation cubicle
giving the impression that it’s always snowing.
Lynn Foote
____________
New evidence of hummingbirds
In Lima’s Inquisition Museum,
everyone is made of wax.
The rack handler and thumb screw guy wear hoods
while the heretics display mild surprise,
that it might have turned out otherwise on a different day
with a different God and a different set of questions.
The nearby Governor’s villa
quivers with so many Archangels, there is a feather on the floor.
They hang framed as family portraits
with pink flamingo wings and breast plates
emblazoned in sacred Incan cantuta blooms.
A modest crucifixion
wears a pretty lace petticoat embroidered with potato flowers
for the Redeemer’s modesty.
‘Christ of the Tremors’ saved Cusco from an earthquake
then raised more silver in a year than all the mines of Peru.
Louche bougainvillea
spills down the garden walls.
Suited waiters correct rows of seats for the evening concert.
A cork pops and glasses are arranged in pyramids.
Above the fountain, a small portal of opal iridescence opens.
My first hummingbird
is watching me.
From all the day’s miracles, this is the hardest to believe:
how to stay alive yet still be capable of flight.
As a test, he slips through a chink in the sky, expecting me
to join him on the other side.
Mark Fiddes
____________
Mary-Jane Holmes
____________
A thesis on emptiness
She is writing a thesis, this young soon to be
Doctor Psychologist, about the experience of ‘emptiness’
for male offenders with mental health problems
and I get it, which for an old female polite non offender
seems unlikely but true, I work with them too.
I hear their echoes bounce back when I call their bluff,
a hard bounce off vacant walls. This woman shines
and the men trust her. An intricate tattoo sits comfortably
along her left calf – winks at us from cropped pants.
I love the highland in her voice. It takes me out of the ward,
to somewhere green with no unwashed bodies, or foul
tempers. It’s no surprise she is vegan and produces
improbable uneatable vegan truffles as hand wrapped
Christmas gifts. I was her Secret Santa once and bought her
a plant sitting inside a felt reindeer, also tasteless.
Unwrapping this bonkers gift from Azda she described
the many kinds of house plant that cover every surface
of her home. No doubt she cares for them with the same
eager tenderness that softens the resistance of such untended
men tied up in the gruelling ‘sections’ of a forensic ward.
They reach taller in the uplift of her voice, muscles tensing
as if ready to catch a ball, almost ready to want more
for themselves. We all know empty but it hasn’t hollowed her.
Instead, she types her thesis filling pages with at least fifty
thousand words that will spell her into a Doctor.
She doesn’t pretend she’s found a remedy but makes
a tool to measure emptiness like any good psychologist would.
Like the way our parents used a yard stick and pencilled
on the kitchen wall above our heads — marks to measure
the inches of our growth, to keep watch.
Michelle Brooks
____________
Broken
A cello makes the saddest music
or pigeons flocked among the rafters
of a drafty barn, that gurgling
sound — like the murmur of a lost
cause. Mist rises from the half-iced
pond, cindered snow, a few brown
leaves dangled from bare trees,
animals breathing underground.
Friends I loved & lost over what?
I’ve walked miles & heard only a crow
call. The road is closed ahead. The bridge
is out that leads across the river into town.
Mike Schneider
____________
Catfish
Lola says fighters are the best
for seafood curry. Her dominant hand grabs
the slithery fish, traps it in a billow of plastic,
obscures its world in a blur. A swift thwack
ends its blindness. Nothing happens
but the gurgling of gravy. Heat judders
the clay pot lid, steam billows and ribbons,
the kitchen window exhales its essence.
One day, Lola will simmer on her bed.
There’ll be no fight. It’ll be slow even her bones
will soften. Her voice will turn to a muffled glum.
She will slink away. Tonight, we eat together.
She arranges the table neat, ladles the soup
in ceramic bowls, gutless pieces belly-up
in oily spiced pools. I see her face through
the cold pitcher. Her scaly freckled skin,
her moustached lip hazed by refraction and vapor.
Her tongue massages her palate, delighted
by her creation. She motions for me to try
a spoonful. I already know it is good.
Rency Raquid
____________
The heron
Down by the retail park, the sheds —
Pets at Home, B&Q, Dunelm —
I found a pond.
Yellow flag irises, peals of them.
A green, arched bridge across the water.
I wonder who designed all this,
this Giverny by the North Circular?
Who’d bother? (Glad they did though).
The things I’ve not done in my life, and won’t now,
sit round me, like unhappy children.
What is the greatest crime
you can commit against your own life?
Being timid with it.
Perched on the orange handrail
of a largely submerged shopping trolley,
a heron. Still, so still,
its focus like a cutting tool. To fly —
away to alder at the water’s edge —
it has to come apart almost,
a loaf being broken open.
Richard Meier
____________
Daughter Country
after Zaffar Kunial
Hear me open as a door, somewhere for others
to move through, desire to move through,
babies to enter. See: I am an aught, a nothing,
a zero — not the son, who tells me to remove
my lipstick, I look like a whore, not the male
colleague who tells me love has no value
without power. I am an ought, a compulsion,
a must, carrying dutiful tea to my father
who tells me I’ll make a beautiful wife.
And here I am, married to dust particles,
my centre a barely whispered gh — as in bought,
as in night — never ending, never closing,
an apology of land etched with the word daughter —
my body open like a wound, a wavering, an er —
Rosie Jackson
____________
Springtime in Paradise
Hot, humid, permanent spring
I had not predicted. Cows flick tails
in clouds of milky heliotrope.
The warmth roots down
in days too light, too long.
I’m hooked on watching
debonair ferns unfurl
tight croziers. Tendrils flower
and fruit on my table,
the plants are losing their sense
of where and when to stop.
Nothing will be outside
the garden when everything
is garden; a tangled reverie.
I’m in my hot-weather gear
all the time, not bothered
by the wrong gases exchanging
around me, fixing in the wrong
places, growing nicely unpredictable.
The grey towers flower gold.
I will get used to great things,
like a war in reverse.
Metal and concrete open
as usable substrates; wider
opportunities for rich meadows.
I am the loose, thin soil
tiny hard-to-pick-out flowers
need, flamboyant lichens
crust on the rocks of my bones.
I sing whatever comes,
whatever comes I sing;
my soft cool bed is rose petals
on coral sand. All at once I flower,
right up to and beyond the end.
Sean Swallow
____________
A passenger’s commentary on a journey from Shanghai to Zhoushan, an island on the East coast of The Peoples Republic of China, via Hang Zhou Bay Bridge: a reminder for The Driver — 24 June 2023
We crossed the Huangpu at half past ten.
We had hired a car to leave when we pleased
but still left in a scramble at breakfast time
and are now in a tizzy on the bridge over the sea.
Six-wheeler lorries are throwing rain off their wheels.
The bleepers are articulating the cameras’ flashes.
Cars crisscross without hand signals or amber flashes,
and the verb to swerve is declining the future tense.
The Driver is hand jiving with the steering wheel.
Our companions are not in a mood to please
and are stalling and veering like gulls over rough seas.
The Driver is moving through space and making time
till parallel lorries converge in infinite time.
Rain is tap-dancing. Lightening is flashing.
The darker clouds are racing with the grey sea.
Screens scream that the wind is force ten.
The Driver feels the rocking, and says she is pleased
that whales may be singing under our wheels.
Trucks have become longer and need more wheels.
than they had in the Helmsman’s time,
but the map keepers must be pleased
to see the bridge and its speed lights flashing
for the articulated descendants of the Jie Fang 10
drawing lines over the East China Sea.
We have travelled 30 kilometres over the sea.
and Poseidon is hinting at the power that he wields.
I shout to The Driver, but she can’t listen.
She is dipping into the madness of Modern Times.
Green and red lights are simultaneously flashing.
Crazy is contagious when technology pleases.
We have left the highway, and now green pleases.
We are in the hills overlooking a calm sea.
Cracks in curtains and blinds are flashing.
We reach the hotel, and I feel dizzy without wheels.
There’s a box by reception that hums all the time.
‘Water boiler’, say I. ‘Taiwan’ is the reply, ‘Listening’.
A porter wheels our cases to a room. The Driver is pleased
that it is traditional not flashy. We can’t avoid listening
to the sea roaring, ‘May you live in interesting times.’
Wyn Jenkins
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