OAt last I'm allowed to say (now that the prize giving has happened) that I won a commended place in this year's Bridport Poetry Prize! As the judge was none other than Carol Ann Duffy I'm an extremely happy bunny. It's amazing to think she read one of my poems, never mind picked it out as a good 'un. So thankyou CAD, thankyou Bridport and your dedicated panel of readers, and thankyou Frances, the fabulous Bridport administrator and all round star who organises everything, and then some. I couldn't go to the prize-giving on Saturday because it fell on the day of my brother's wedding, but I'm looking forward to receiving my copy of the anthology in the post.Here's the poem:
One step at a time
My grandfather stops on the stairs
00000to pick up
0000000000a thin white hair
- it is the evening perhaps
and he touches the bed-warmer on the wall
the promise of aired sheets; of sleep
held in its banjo of copper and oak -
or maybe the morning, and he climbs
away from the kitchen's chilly tiles,
the cup and saucer, rinsed
and draining on the board -
and picks up
oooooothe thin white hair
and offers it up to the light in the way
we might hold a photograph
or a wedding ring; as if it is the light
from the morning street or the gas fire
or the desk-lamp, wet against the night's window
that will show us what it means to us.
oooooooooooooooooooEver since she died
he's been finding these traces of her, caught
on his coat, or resting in the air
like the words he can't quite hear;
it's like falling in love
oooooooonly somehow in reverse
- those promises we read in one another;
a smile, a touch, nudging his chest -
and yet, these are not harbingers of love
so much as parting gifts, that leave him
startled and knowing himself once more
in the spaces between the clock's slow chimes
or the warmth of his body
edging through the bed.
OOOOOOOOOOOOO
