To Iken and back

CAROLINE PRICE

 

Walk along the Alde’s meanders

from the maltings; leave the concert hall behind

and the sculptures and climb to the thin path

along the dyke: in thirty years

nothing has changed – within minutes

the only sounds are the hush of wind in the rushes

and birds crying. The duckboards tread over

your past, its creeks and channels

trailing their debris, a strong familiar odour.

Go past the field where you picnicked

to where, below a stand of trees

the tides have carved that sudden, surprising cove,

a beach hidden from the by-road

where you left the car, dragging the dinghy down

the slope of dark sand: those are the tracks,

still visible, and there a boat still, moored

and shimmering, just out of reach.

The cove is full now, washed with grey

to a perfect scallop, half-submerged.

How important the tides, how delicate

the timing; you have only a couple of hours

to push between withies into the deeper water,

feeling the lurch and uprighting

of the little vessel, hearing the sharp crack

as the sail tautens, fills. Launch yourself

into the river, beyond its troublesome reaches;

forget for a moment how hard the boat is

to manoeuvre, its capsizes, a sister

doubled up laughing as you cousin in a panic

hurls himself upwards and runs

howling along the flattened mast

like a boy running on water…This is the place,

and here the upturned peeling hull

that was here then, and the old lime pit;

walk far enough and you will pass the kiln

burning again, the Anchor risen from waste grass

Serving the sailors and draymen;

the voices you hear now are theirs, or carry

from the salt works or from Iken church,

alone on its spit, gazing clearly

across reeds to the far side of the river –

Walk back to Iken; you have

forgotten nothing, and it is not sad,

the river narrows and widens again

but everyone you loved is still with you.

 

 

‘To Iken and back’ won third prize in the TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2012.

 

 

 

My Private Collection

A.C. CLARKE

(Glasgow)

 

Smells of stuffed birds moulting, mothballs, ether.

I walk the shiny linoleum between cases

where dogfish hang suspended like lifeboats,

enter one room through an aisle of whale-ribs,

a room of narwhal skulls, each rapiered jaw

fineboned as the brow of a unicorn.

 

Trays of pierced butterflies spread wings whose sheen

dulled long ago, here are corals and sponges

Brittling in the parched air, all colour leached,

sets of teeth on the grin, knucklebones, ox-horns,

tucked in a drawer wadded with packing, eggs

which will never hatch. A second drawer

 

holds beetles ranged by size, glazed over time

to monochrome brown. I am searching for something

not this timber wolf’s faked snarl, canines gleaming,

against a painted backdrop, nor that tattered bear

propped on hindlegs, claws impotently curved.

The exit, perhaps? It is arrowed in green neon.

 

Darkness is falling. Through tall windows

trees flail their branches, a strip of road

unwinds into the distance. Christmas lights

swing wildly, roped from gibbet to iron gibbet.

In here the temperature never varies,

nothing moves, or can move, unless in slow

 

degeneration. I am at home with that stasis,

the hush that coats the rooms thick as dust.

Once outside I might hear on the wind

the voices of rain which are also the voices

of children. I might remember

what I left to wait like clagged boots at the door.

 

 

‘My Private Collection’ won second prize in the TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2012

 

Intruders and Thieves

MANDY PANNETT

(Pulborough)

 

A single bird is awake in a tree

there’s a rasp of crows

a hoot from an owl ...

 

Two stone owls at the back of the house

look sad in this half-light.

Their feathers are chipped.

 

Remember that day?  That country fair?

We came home with chutneys and jams

and a pair of owls, one each.

 

At first they stood by the step at the front.

You said they were guardians keeping us safe

from all intruders and thieves.

 

Now they are under the cherry tree

veiled in every tumbling blossom which drifts

at the end of spring.

 

Well I don’t care, they can stay there forever –

weathering, grubbier by the day –

since you’re not here

 

to wash the pigeon droppings off

or tease the grit from their grey-green plumes

with an old toothbrush.  

 

Anyway

they failed  to keep intruders out

since you decided to let one in...

 

Was it in darkness when you did,

silently, like the wing-beats of an owl

and as stealthily?

 

Beautiful, the hooting owl:

sand and salt in a glow of beige, wings like canopies

of velvet, a long and pausing call  –

 

but vicious, born to kill.

That’s its nature, I suppose, to ravage

and eat hearts.

 

 

‘Intruders and Thieves’ was highly commended in the TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2012

 

The Lost Library of Jesi

CAROLINE MALDONADO

(London)

 

They handled them with cotton gloves. Leather covers

tooled in gold, paper from Fabriano, printed woodcuts

 

from Bologna: manuscripts, almanacs, books of poetry

and philosophy, science and history; mappa mundi

 

and the first edition of the Divine Comedy. They lifted

bevelled bookshelves, levered panels from the walls

 

and as they worked the sun spilled centuries of light

through slits in the shutters across the marble tiles.

 

Until behind the coffered panels they discovered

fissured stones opening to a sealed room, windowless

 

and cool, with columns fallen under a hemispheric dome,

shadows curled asleep in empty niches along the walls.

 

The men crawled inside that chamber’s deepest quiet

where one or two still could hear the beating of a heart.

 

 

The Lost Library of Jesi was highly commended in the TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2012.