Where the Chicken Pecked

By Mary Oliver

 

It occurs to you one day

that your parents,

like your favourite chicken

they slaughtered for Sunday lunch,

will die.

 

You lie down in the warm grass

of a sunlit field and you cry.

You cry till they find you.

 

They put you to bed, still crying.

 

You hear them outside your bedroom door,

What can it be? It’s not her usual grizzling.

 

They take it in turns

to come in and sit beside you on your bed.

What is it? You must say.

They even begin to get cross.

But of course you can’t tell them.

You don’t want to hurt their feelings.

 

The next day you put it behind you,

never give it another thought

 

not until first one dies

then the other

leaving you a few years in which to enjoy

the freedom of a late orphanage.

 

You’re thinking about it again now, aren’t you?

Death. You think about it a lot.

 

You’re thinking how good it’ll be

to return to the field where you cried,

where the chicken pecked.

 

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Where the Chicken Pecked was highly commended in the African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013

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Mary Oliver writes from Newlyn, Cornwall.

 

 

 

 

 

Another Story

after Catherine Smith

 

By Julie Mellor (UK)

 

She took a basket and gathered windfalls. Their dead weight

pulled at her shoulders as she lugged them indoors.

She took a bone-handled knife from the kitchen drawer,

the one her father had used to carve the beef.

She sliced the apples clean down the middle, their pips

like tiny wooden lungs.

 

When the children came home there was nothing to eat

except hard cubes of turnip left over from the lantern

she’d made, the lantern now grinning candle light

in the kitchen window, and slices of apple

sour enough to make them squint.

 

She removed their squints with the point of the knife,

threaded them with cotton and strung them above the Aga

where they dried like honesty. When her husband came home

she wound the garland of squints around his neck,

told him she was already late, grabbed the bone-handled knife

and fled into the night.

 

The knife acted like a compass, pointing North.

She followed its lead, walked until the soles of her shoes

wore thin and the wet uppers were soft as cardboard.

Thorns snagged her tights; her white skin shone through the holes

like a scattering of silver coins, or the thumbprints

of her children as they had gripped her wrist.

 

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Another Story won the first prize, African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013

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Julie Mellor lives in Penistone, near Sheffield, and teaches English at a local secondary school. After gaining a degree in English at the University of Huddersfield, she went on to do an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam, followed by a PhD, which she completed in 2003. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Brittle Star, Mslexia, The Rialto and Smiths Knoll. Her pamphlet, Breathing Through Our Bones, was published by Smith Doorstop in 2012.

Mumbue Sonnet

By John Gallas (UK)

 

‘the full man knows not the hungry, or the rider the walker’

 

I’m walkin in my feet to Mumbue.

The sun comes up. I’m crackling like a chicken.

Whoa, I’m happy. Somethin’s comin, kickin

clouds of yeller grit behin me. Hey!

Stop !  It don’t. Who cares ? It whirls away.

I seen inside the flyin cotton curtain –

Business sat with Care. My toes are hurtin.

Whoa, I got to walk another day.

How quick they fly to worry. What I got

the other end improves with ev’ry gleam

along the long horizon, fat an’ hot.

Whyever hurry ? Happiness will keep,

an’ sorrow passes. Sleep, my baby, sleep.

 

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Mumbue Sonnet won third prize in the African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013 

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Not a Third World Country

By Katelin Farnsworth

 

I’m going to be honest –

because no one else ever is

my first world problems are totally first world blessings

I had barely been alive when I thought I knew it all, I felt like I was down there with you, that I really understood your dilemma. That even though I had never actually witnessed a war or been a part of any bombing,

I definitely understood your pain.

just let me facebook these feelings first.

oh wait
here I am – I’m not in a warzone at all! Here I am.

putting tulips on the window sills     painting my face
I wouldn’t know pain if it hit me  boom  in the mouth

I actually can’t bear to think about the spiders and scorpions

ear bleeding thoughts

trapped deep

 

so instead I worry about:
black stockings “pull them up higher”
red lips bleached teeth,
always repeating a little mantra to myself

this is like so totally not a third world country.

 

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Not a Third World Country was highly commended in the African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013

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A Letter to the Outside

By Katelin Farnsworth (Australia)

 

You bang on about feelings,
as if you could have any.

I want you to know that the gentleman

in the long white coat is here again,

and everything you said sits on my skin,
ugly mulberry bruises that ache.

The glass in here loosens itself

in small window frames.

I am forever tracing the dust with my fingers,

imagining that somewhere, another version of me

is circling the skies, saying beautiful things.

Remember those dirty eggs you brought in?

They were the same colour as your eyes.
but what would I do with eggs?
Really, I don’t need your eyes.

Oh, here we go again.
I’d know that slack mouth anywhere.
Please put your tongue away. I don’t want

to see it smack against the front of your teeth.

I don’t feel like hearing your apology
and I’m not going to read your letter.

Don’t write back.

 

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A Letter to the Outside won second prize in the African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013.

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African Prisons Project Short Story Competition 2013 Cancelled

We regret that after the extension of entry deadline and hundreds of email invitations to authors to enter the African Prisons Project Short Story Competition, we only managed to receive 14 entries to this competition. This poor response to the competition means that it hardly raised any money at all for the charity and we are not persuaded that there are enough entries to make the competition fierce enough. 

 

We have no option but to cancel this competition and will be refunding all the entrants their full entry fees. We will be in touch with all entrants within 7 days. Speed of contact will depend on whether they entered by e-mail or by post.

 

If you have any questions about this, please contact excelforcharity@easternlightepm.com

Judge’s Report & Results, African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013

We are pleased to announce the results of the first African Prisons Project Poetry competition judged by Bob Beagrie.

 

Judge’s Report 

 

It was both a pleasure and as always a challenge to act as a judge for the competition. The entries varied dramatically in subject matter, style, form and tone and upon first reading them all I felt somewhat overwhelmed at the task of narrowing them down to a handful of the best entries. However, after several careful rereads  I had shortlisted twenty of the poems that particularly stood out to me, showing originality, flair, a control of form, a clarity of language, which seemed to work on a number of different levels, which played with ambiguity while having something to say, and which also represented a distinctive and compelling voice.

 

The five poems I finally settled on as the winning three and the two highly commended all continued to surprise and intrigue me, even after multiple readings, all show an awareness of the dynamics and tensions between form and content and play with contrasting discourses, each held something of the common-place experience but transformed it through lyrical compression, striking language, suggestion and implication so that it resonates, gains weight and seems to blossom in the mind into unexpected significances and feelings you recognise but had never before quite manage to name.

 

To me good poetry opens your eyes, reveals something new, but it is not just the eyes that look out upon the world it opens but the eye that is trained inwards at the ways in which we respond to the world and its circumstances. The five poems all in some way succeeded in this, but I’d like to make a few observations about the three winning pieces:

 

‘Another Story’s precise ordinary detail of objects and actions is deftly turned by startling touches of abstraction into fairy tale tropes that give it an archetypal bearing, without losing its footing in an identifiable world while we are, before we know it, swept away into the uncanny.

 

The mix of abrupt conversational, even accusational, address, sharp imagistic detail and the shifts to a more intimate, confessional tone in ‘A letter to the outside’ gives this poem an unsettling and powerful dynamic. The gentleman in the long white coat, the mulberry bruises, the sudden introduction of the image of dirty eggs, their association to eyes, the slack mouth all conjure an uneasy atmosphere we must enter tentatively with suspended faith in the reliability of the language given.

 

The fine control of form while employing a clear voice in non-standard English in ‘Mumbue Sonnet ‘ creates an exciting defamiliarising effect that brings the reader up sharp and tells us to take note, this is not what we might first assume it to be, and few things ever are.  It is full of striking phrases ‘I’m walking in my feet to Mumbue’ ‘ I’m crackling like a chicken’  and the emotions of happiness and sorrow  mentioned are all part of the trek.

 

Bob Beagrie

 

Results

 

Ist Prize – Another Story – Julie Mellor (UK)

2^nd Price – A letter to the outside – Katelin Farnsworth (Australia)

3^rd Prize - Mumbue Sonnet – John Gallas (UK)

Highly Commended

Not a third world country – Katelin Farnsworth

Where The Chicken Pecked – Mary Oliver (UK)

 

The winning and highly commended poems will be published in the Excel for Charity News Blog on Friday 7^th of June, 2013.

 

Congratulations to the prizewinners.