Blue Hyacinths

Like bruises, she remembers thinking
as she fingered the bulbs, their paper-wafery skins
tinged with the shifting iridescence
she'd last seen on mussel-shells.

That was six weeks to a day before the grim diagnosis.
She'd chanced on them - three firm orbs peeking through
a Woolworth's bag her husband had stashed at the back
of her utility drawer - a temporary forgetfulness.

Sensing time was running out, and as surprise for him
she'd taken them, firming them in fresh compost,
and recalling his sermoning - Water, then forget them.
Best let the roots put out their filaments - had placed
the crazed porcelain bowl below the dark stair-well.

By the time the X-ray came, their tips had
nippled through, with stems pushing to fullness
the next few months on the kitchen window-sill.
He was thrilled. But, the bruises puddling hungrily
to mulberry down his leg, hadn't had chance to see,
or smell, or touch the blossoms' waxy handsomeness.

Now back from the crem under angling sun
and the mist of sherry glasses - her family long gone,
Father Dykes sliding benignly away - she catches
minor-glimpses of herself finger-tracing their bell-shapes,
their deaths already settling in.

Suddenly shudders at palls of heady fragrances,
and, repelled by their Our-Lady-blueness gaping,
that bruising insolence of living,
confesses she cannot understand
why for the life of her
he so cherished them,
year on year
on year.

- Roger Elkin

"Blue Hyacinths" won the First Prize in the Diversity House (Excel for Charity) Poetry Competition 2009

I.E.D.

('Improvised Explosive Devices, known as IEDs, are the insurgents' deadliest weapon ...' The Times)

In the dark metallic silence my clock ticks
Only the beetles and soft moths stir the dust at my feet
They pause uncertainly, swivel their lunar eyes
Brush with curious antennae the black box
Of my secret

In the packed inner spaces my mind works
Only the wires and tiny switches hear the hum of my labours
They click neatly, pass orders
Measure precisely the last moments
Of my undoing

In the still air my heart bursts
Only the heat and charred walls remain of my lodging
Fragments journey, take routes
Reach blindly the brick and blood
Of their resting place

In this happening I am fulfilled
No thought or feeling mars my perfection
Safe in my purpose I have no morality
Free from the terrible burden
Of my maker

- Charles Evans

"I.E.D" by Charles Evans won the Second Prize in the Diversity House (Excel for Charity) Poetry Competition 2009.

EMPTIES

It's not the silence of 3am I miss,
nor the electric purr of the float,
nor the thrill of reaching

15 miles per hour on the High Street,
nor the satin-clad housewives
who bow like geishas

to pick their pints off freezing doorsteps,
nor the taut gold sovereigns
of bottle tops

reflecting the slow sluice of sunrise,
nor the babv-sick smell of a spill
not mopped up.

What I miss
is the chatter of a thousand empties
returning to the depot:

sleighbells echoing on fresh fallen snow.

- Julie Mellor

"Empties" by Julie Mellor won the Third Prize in the Diversity House (Excel for Charity) Poetry Competition 2009.