Mirehouse Poetry Competition 2010

The Mirehouse Poetry Competition is based on the theme of "The bliss of solitude" (Wordsworth). The competition was judged by awarding winning poet and writer, John Burnside and culminates with the prize giving at The Garden Hall at Mirehouse on Saturday 13th March 2010.
The organisers of the Cumbrian Literature Festival, 'Words by the Water', have given valuable support and encouragement to make this competition possible.

This year the Mirehouse Poetry Competition was won by Jennifer Copley for her poem "Now You're Gone". The prize winning poem and eight highly commended poems are set out below and are displayed on the Mirehouse Poetry Walk

Finalists in the Mirehouse Poetry Competition 2010

NOW YOU’RE GONE

I hear the creak of next door’s stairs,
Miss Miriam’s footsteps, her early-morning cough,
the squeak on the banister of her blue-veined hands.
From the kitchen there’s the slosh of her water-jug,
the hiss of a tea-kettle, the scrape of burnt toast.
Grates are riddled, steps are scrubbed.
Radio 3 (mixed with the smell of best mince)
floats from her window, doubles back into mine.
She’s always lived alone since Billy Shoesmith …
What? She never says.

At night we wind the clocks,
twisting the old black keys till our wrists crack.
As we climb the stairs, the owls return
to our joint chimney pot. The ‘Twoooo’ floats down
as we brush our heads of long white hair.
Bed-springs groan. We reach for our books.
She’s reading the lives of early English kings;
I’m reading the twelve labours of Hercules,
How to Win at Chess, a book on bereavement,
another about a man who invented Cat’s Eyes.

Jennifer Copley

WINNER OF THE MIREHOUSE POETRY PRIZE 2010

NOT LOST SINCE LAST TIME

The borrowed pony, round as a rolling sea,
walks willing, for once, plodding the boom
of breakers down a sheeptrack.

Reins loose through fingers and gut jarred softly
by hooves, a child riding between leather
and sky, slack and absent, her thoughts

spiralled in her grandmother’s shell
on its dusty sill, in not its native land.
The shell’s still curled round this green morning

when, young and sudden, a fox is on the path,
giving its absolute attention, and not afraid.
The fox, the pony, the sheeptrack,

the stones steeped in the fell below
this red-brush moment’s contact
between wild, and not-wild.

The child watching and finding
that she was all of them
and not them either.

*

Still it sits like a small red god on the sheeptrack,
ears cocked. It turns up again in the ribcage,

an expanding red-brush moment’s joy
at being all of them, and not them;

like holding the shell, fat weight in the hand,
and checking that the sea’s inside, not lost since last time.

Jean Atkin

THROUGH THE BLIZZARD A MAN WALKS

(after Richard Long)

He is in his element. He calls it art.
He will count the hours. He will call them art.
He will count the tors. He will call them art.
He will count his footsteps perhaps
as he plods through the white world,
lashes clagged with snow, imagination
spinning his compass. He will remember
himself as he once was, silent, alone
in the wide world of possibility.

He treads snow, half leans on the wind,
eyes watching grass bend, grit skid
on iced puddles. Through the white whirl
looms the land’s knuckle, bare bone
in its plastering of snow, stone rampart,
castle, house shape, a whistling,
a sense of something arrived at.
Is it home? Or is it art?

A man walks through a blizzard.
He is not at home.
He is in his element.

Mike Barlow

MEGEVETTE, FRENCH ALPS

The garden chair has been carefully placed
beneath these sheltering pines
but reading’s a struggle this afternoon.

Power lines buzz and shine a
valley-spanning parabola to where
a farmer tracks and tracks the field
a fraction before the tractor’s moan.

Crows croak, cowbells chorus, a squadron of swallows
chase and scream in dogfight.

Some minutes yet until the church bell
will clang out the hour.

A pair of buzzards cruise and quarter the sky
and everything falls freeze-frame quiet.

I turn back to my page:
The drunkenness of things being various,
and turn away again
not wanting to miss this moment
or this moment’s moment.

John Clarke

COAST

Allow your eyes to follow the small copper butterfly, dottier
than the spots on its wings, as it flits over pink-tinged convolvulus,
across the yellow-cushion centres of waving penny-moons.

Trace the line of coves daubed with kittiwakes, raucous
as the breakers, but snug as houseleeks on unlikely ledges
while some sea god, too primitive for a trident, froths beneath.

Let the dark cormorant, intent on the future spear
the spindrift like a small tornado. Ride each moment
like that solitary gull, buoyed up by wind or sea.

Kathryn Daszkiewicz

MENG HAO-JAN ON THE LAKE OF THE TEN THOUSAND MOUNTAINS

I too sought the perfect companion – but soul friends are hard to find.
Wiser to profit from solitude, stay home and lock your gate
And if you have to go fishing from time to time (to supplement
The exemplary diet of vegetables) go to an island to cast off your line.
As I do. This is how it is meant to be – waters clear, heart opaque,
Fish astute (if you want to be left alone that’s fine with us),
Monkeys hidden in thickets on the far bank releasing derisive shrieks
And the last of the fishing boats turning for home. Wholly, vastly,
Sublimely alone! Though I wouldn’t say no to the local visitation
Of a goddess whose beauty’s undimmed though she’s no longer young,
Her face jade-white, profound, troubled, moon veiled by cloud,
Sighing: The way has been difficult and perilous and it is late
But finally I have come upon one with as deep and abiding an ache
So I bestow on you this brimming heart, my prince. For this goddess
I keep an eye out (nothing doing with fish). But no sign.
And indeed it is late. There is only the habitual tryst between
The sorrow of sunset and that of the wanderer. On beats
The little boat, single sail taut in the changeable wind, as the song
Of the helmsman, though high and true, loses its way to the moon.

Michael Foley

MOTH-PRINT SPRING

Pressed in the pages of a book
a moth that must have landed there
has turned into this powder blur,
the one dimension of itself.
Someone reading one Spring night

shut a sudden paper tomb
and trapped this echo of a flight.
A feint of light drew it there:
some dull reflection off the page
that made it seem a moon-lit flower


has made a moth an allegory.
I opened it by accident,
or some dust pressure did the same,
for a purpose that has melted,
in a bookshop long forgotten,


in a town I could not name –
and found a shadow on the text.
These wings out-spread on the border
are printed out as fastened flight
and what was movement in the dark

is transferred to a trick of light:
the trace unjustifies the page
and lies like some erratic proof
or strange bird caught in miniature
that what is frozen still remains,

that all the ruled lines stay the same.
What is it that is captured here:
night crawler, myth mark, moth of thought,
now fixed and drifting out of date?
For changing once it stays unchanged.

Or does it lift? Or has it stirred?
for something taps at the darkened pane
(summons of a finished Spring)
and a new moth-pale visitant burrs
against my own reflected face.

The book is balanced on my hand
as a moth will settle on a page:
to touch on things that move to grey,
all the ghosts of the self
closed in books we read somewhere.

Terry Jones

SILENCE

and the silence of the silent house
is so most and very delightful (Coleridge)

The old walls keep it in. The front room brims
up to the glass; it leans against the door,
huge as a high tide in a little bay
when there is no wind. Only the slow swim
of a ticking clock circles the kitchen,
snatches of birdsong carried on its rim.
The stairs float on it, filling the cool air
under the roof until it passes through.
I’m unconsidered, hardly here, briefly
included. The clock tells me we have shared
half a minute, explaining that the house
feels like this always, without me in it.

Candy Neubert

STAYING OUT

Late June:

slow disintergration
of a long,
glimmering evening
settles on grass,

fox-light,

soft growl
from an edgy pigeon,


apple trees
giving up the ghosts
of leaves;

as I
fade into the dark,

your voice
is a ladder to the house.

Isobel Thrilling

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