First Place Winner, September 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, September 2003

DORMITION
      Anne Marie Eldon
      (The Writer’s Block)

I would sense borders,
the towpaths past shouldering drays.
Before indiscriminate Sunday hordes, a black headed gull follows
the plough for leather jacks; in close-up
should be chocolate brown.
Land also.

I forfeit strict scent edges,
my toes neck’d, strake the frass of spilling ants,
pre-tense their winging.
Hollow stalked cow parsley straggles,
I struggle after a laudity. A plover, its lapwings broad,
momentarily folds, nests in

marsh. Where do I start?
In a gaggle whose moulted feathers grounded
them, now grown to skein.
Coots come out, white, white, white bobs from reed beds.
A mute swan. Special spot. Skis. Stop.
What quest me?

There are barn swallows in agile flight.
A spring of teal spike vertical. My busy life, up.
I should like down:
the 3-spined stickleback in mud safe.
Then if not through specialness,
then plainness and fecundity.

A grebe dives into its rest of rotting vegetation,
does not protest young, carried aback.
A rare swan mussel, bouldered by a slight drought,
must filter 30 litres a day.
Responsibilities, ripples.
My soul, a freshwater shrimp, hiding under a stone. Yes, I should

like down.
Furrows from rowers’ burrowing paddles
their wide shoulders no doubt
their breath harmony with each others.’
I would frill tail, know fins, risk choke
vow violence aperture dive-back
my fingertips a stipple of bubbles below surface
mistaken

                        I

                        become barbel, lashing, dangering the weir,
urban kayaks steer the forewash,
gudgeon gravelling worms. Flies in the face of reason, freedom
treason. Ah St Gabriel’s calling,
roaring. A dace rises, batches flies. Flies in the face of freedom.

Long alone, I prise wombstone. Bequeath death.
Take off my girdle.
Yes, St. Thomas, recalled, goes

                                                open tomb.
Water-striders crop vibrations of the fallen. Falling. Kingfisher plunges
perch water prey. Adjusts its catch point inwards, my innards
always taking whole. I swallow,
my haul home a safety I make for tunnel for bank for a runnel of fishbone.

You were once big.
Now only the tiny can help me.
A water boatman swims, top bellied,
carries bubble, silver,
its spiracles breathing through currency, ventricle.

You were there, once.
Maybe you remember poison must hewn sown
Oxford ragwort cyaniding horses, flint shrapnel, coffled crows.
Or hope

-- rosebay willowherb’s purple remittal the azure damselfly dragon
                                                    lapis-flash
clouds for shrouds a halo of mares tails trails
a puce mackerel sky
a slurp rainblue

I quant a strong body, of holy.
Water-walker, storm calmer.
Risen Son, I want cradle me, my motherhood
swaddled against His child-man’s lullabying bosom.

I ply between reversal and derision,
each stile a straddle,
shallow the kill, unbidden.
My non-tidal burden, bare.

It is set day. Still.
My amniotics, sluiced
to dry chrism, don’t.

Yet who will sleep me
if you won’t?

Judge Claire Hero’s comment: “What particularly draws me to this poem is its use of language. The poem develops its own vocabulary with which to describe the poet’s awe of nature and nature’s relationship to worship and religion. By doing this, by making strange the language, the poem enables us to experience the natural world anew. At the same time, the poem enables us to live momentarily in a playful space, one which creates its own logic out of the language and which refuses to resemble the quotidian. It is this balance that intrigues me.”