POETRY PRIZE

In the city, she thinks of Beauty Creek

She’s never seen the place in winter: it’s like trying to imagine
a child being old, it can scarcely be done. Mud frozen,
falls stopped: sheen of ice over rocks. Rush and tumble of streams
halted and silent. Lakes enamelled with ice. Land under snow,
bound with it, bandaged. Bulbs and roots fixed in stiff earth.
The whole landscape suspended, in stasis: like someone near death
who has no energy for anything but breathing. Even the bears
are asleep in their caves. Even the river, the great pale green
Sunwapta is ice, is still. This is the hardest thing to imagine,
like thinking of the dead. And the house by the river,
its spring water frozen, windows curtained with snow
making a strange underwaterish light in the rooms
where everything will be as she left it: the woodpile, the table,
pots by the stove, the gleaming jars of bottled fruit,
dark gold of maple syrup she drew out of the trees.
A house with no one in it, like a body emptied of its soul.
Everything closed down, closed in on itself. As if,
when she left, she were Persephone, and in her absence,
winter came. As if she’d turned the huge Sunwapta into ice.
Something must make it happen, something mythical
that would make you believe in what’s unseen –
a house under snow with its bottles and jars,
the pent force of a stopped river, and underneath the ice
six feet of air, and down below that, water still flowing,
the silty, unstoppable water with its living fish.

Elizabeth Burns

Borrowscale Cycle

Wetherlam wharrels down loadpot low
Nethermost leeming in mirehouse row
Rainsborrow lonscale waterside fall
Corridor shelter in beckside hall

Bannerdale greenburn capplefall knowe
Breasthigh crookabeck lazonby flow
Townhead hinning at waterhead spout
Overgates landsfoot outerside out

Oldchurch sallows in sunderland field
Underscar cottages pooley bield
Shivery brandelhow sprinkling sand
Bretherdale chapelhouse bedlands stand

Burnbanks cloven at thunacar force
Ellonby earthwork in fleetwith haws
Rowantree withered at dead dubbs fawe
Waterfall thunders overend ore

Goggleby guardhouse kitchenhill spy
Underwood bunkers on buttress high
Snittlegarth village in snarker slack
High street drunken on whitewater black

Settlement fewling at highground moor
Emerald southerndale causeway door
Honeypot monument herdwick height
Moorhouses stand over widewath white

Braesteads brimmer under broadness moat
Southernby riddings sail woodhouse boat
Manesty sergeant riggindale ark
Motherby strickland walloway park

Shipman sharrows at lowbridge middle
National marshalls swirl o swirral
Bessyboot naddles floshgate gimmer
Deepdale end of cumbrian summer

Author’s note:
All words used in this poem are drawn from place names and features shown on Ordnance Survey 1:50000 scale map 90, Penrith and Keswick, hence the restricted vocabulary.

Alan Dawson

By No Means

By no means like the trailing of her dress
you followed to your own decline for years,
nor like the hair that trailed on her dress
you followed to the brink of bone-cold tears,
and all you wanted was her happiness,
and all you wanted after all was yours.

By no means like the language that she spoke.
You listened and you listened and you heard
in English and in Spanish, all that talk
that no one ever said they understood,
you understood as if it were your talk,
as if it were yourself you understood.

By no means like the days nor like the years
you waited at the corner of her world
as hungry as a snake; you waited all those years
behind the dress that trailed, the hair that trailed,
you trailed as if something that was yours
would soon be yours, unless of course you failed.

By no means like the river or the wave
despite the trailing dress, the trailing hair,
nor even like the dust-drenched light you saved
in memories in memory of her.
If anything she moved like a chopping knife
in sine like oscillations through the air.

Robert Griffiths

Snow In Alston

Snow falls along the Hartside road
and on the sheep huddled by stone walls
and on the moor’s outstanding beauty
and the derelict house 1900ft above sea level.
It’s blowing in from the North-West – unusual
for snow– over Eden fells, mountains,
a blizzard against farmers gates
and over lakes, Thirlmere and Derwent Water.
Even so Mrs Munro lights up her Old Virginia
and watches for the umpteenth time Pride and Prejudice
I thought I should have broke my heart …
while in the upstairs of Bastle houses
with single glaze windows filling up, breaths rise
and the snow follows and follows and covers
the stone roofs and scaffoldings
and the red tractor rusting in the yard
and Russ forgiving his father and fathers sin
not to mention How to heal your life
and the Methodist minister dying
and it was nice snow should come this morning
now with whiteness all around
spread wide over an unseen sky.
Yet still it sheds down and will all night we are told
fall on the Stainmore road
and everyone stranded there in the back seats
along the dual carriageway of the A66
and on Appleby and the alms houses
O Jane, Jane what is to become of us…
and lord only knows
and isn’t life to be endured
and they’re predicting snow tonight and tomorrow
at least 20 cms over the Pennines and the North
and all along the main arteries
and on Julia’s new people carrier
and St Augustus and the exorcist priests.
It’s snowing on the Tyne and the coffin tracks,
the bus shelters and Stobart trucks
and on all the children leaving school at 2 O’clock.
It’s snowing on all of us.

Deborah Hobbs

Sleep-Talking

She was talking in her sleep, not
clearly, hardly English, as if sleeping
she tip-toed through a charred dictionary
as large as a house. I heard
a mutter from a womb: it was echoic, cobby,

down at the roots, sounding
like a bairn lost in a ribbed basement.
I listened to brief growls
the little vowels of a grief slow and vague.
She said mm mommelle mammellen

mm memmumellia
The powdery consonants
a tutankhamun of strangeness in the bedroom.
I nudged silence, and she was silent;
mum, a mask in the dark, lips sealed.

But she must have moved then
wherever she was and was passing barefoot
through ghost pages drifting deeper
down an unlit stairwell, stubbing the dust
and mumbling again. She said

am mm muroemm eommarawi
imm m em atumm
It was a foetal slur, papyral and vacant,
the dark flakes of syllables
crumbling on her tongue. I shivered

and nudged again. Silence…
This time a long, long, silence…
and one final breath
that was nostrilled, drawn out and stopped,
as if far off a door creaked and closed:

she said nn n nirrr…
then settled at last in the sheets.
The furniture stood in its shadows,
Her gold in its little box.
She lay, as ever, arms at her side,

in the darkness, amber lids shelled.
In the windings of breath
we began our silt migration into sleep,
carrying nothing, the words like dunes
flowing to new arrangements.

Terry Jones