WARE POETS

First Prize:  

The Moon-Calf

The spinney hid the Moon-Calf
from the labouring men.
Poor creature, it was nesh and leer,
having a hunger on it.  Nothing
but holly and hawthorne in the lagger
and spiney sloe for it to feed upon.

Squatting on misshaped haunches
it blarted I-know-not-what-all to be fed
and comforted, rooked in the shippen
with the beasts and given care,
its mother having lately gone to glory.

Huck-muck it was, half-saved,
hameleets drawn closely wrapped
about its legs against the hocksey blowing in,
and the night air wet in fields and furrows,
under the queech-grass,
bleached in the moon's view.
 
The Moon-Calf bellocked on, until
finding him thus, the villagers
took him in, remarking on the moon-white
pallor of his milky skin, pale tongue;
those empty, empty eyes.

	M. V. Williams


Second Prize:

Essay on Light

Light expatiates upon itself,
slicks candlesticks, laps glass and plunders lenses

indulgently, becoming York or Chartres,
is spectrally prismatic in the rain,

ethereal in neon as it hums
the untold names of God.  A tumbler

of it will give you everything you need
to fabricate the sky.  It mocks the speed

of memory and has its own tall house
that looks like chalk or dusty ivory.

The carbon hearts of crystal Fabergé
glister with its nothingness, its thin

infinity.  And when it comes to you,
you rise up from it, as if from a bath,

your shining skin like plates of hammered zinc,
gleaming and lucent.  It pools inside the eyes

of cows.  It dreams in trees.  It jewels beetles. 
As if that wasn't all, it is the whole

of everything; where it is not is something
else.  It seems it cannot be destroyed.

The afterglow of copulating angels
in stars and scratchy skylights.  Let it be.

		C. J. Allen


Joint Third Prize:

My Own Landscape

I had tried to ignore the sea's salt lure
as I travelled the roads that looped landscapes
of ordered fields and sombre patterned woods.
But, past its equinox, an autumn sun
glistening distantly on freckled waters
drew me to the delicate curve of the bay.

There a warm wind blew and I met the bay
as an old friend who has no need of lures
to tempt me down the path to where water
stretched out towards the island, a landscape
of sea and shadowed rocks against the sun.
Yet I held back and turned to see the woods

and the white houses sharp against those woods
that crowded the cliffs.  They made their own bays
and speckled coves with leaves so that the sun
itself was trapped by the branching lure
that leads the feet through a tangled landscape,
one that ripples darkly like deep waters.

The houses were shuttered, blank-eyed to the waters
and the now cool wind through the looming woods.
I no longer felt at ease with the landscape.
The rocks threw long shadows across the bay,
the distant island winked lights that could lure
me into unknown harbours where the sun

might not cast a welcome light, where the sun,
in flames, might set into frenzied waters
and it becomes hard to ignore the lure
of an eternal sleep in sheltered woods.
Doubtful I stood between the dusk filled bay
the houses and the woods, my own landscape

swirling through my memories.  A landscape
with open shutters in white houses, the sun
lighting the surf on the edge of the bay,
a far off island in hazy waters
while autumn's splashed palette coloured the woods.
I was relaxed, recognising the lure

standing clear, the lure of my own landscape,
made of white houses in woods lit by the sun,
remembered waters in a sandy bay.

		Alan Chambers


Joint Third Prize:

Names

"The star's wobble suggests the presence of unseen companions."
From Astronomy, a self-teaching guide, published by John Wiley and Sons, 2002.


As planets are discovered by effects
upon their sun - their momentary blight
on radiance allows us to detect

a transit from a quiver in the light -
so a word can dot a droplet of ink
upon its source, and thereby trick our sight

into contriving between them a link,
or a fusion of their natures.  A sun
is made whole by its wobble when we think

of it; brought to life by our perception,
as though naming something will make it real,
when a name is only an occlusion,

passing over the surface it conceals.
Names return, lit with new significance,
bright with the shadows of what they can steal

		Josie Turner


The RedPage Sonnet Prize:

Love Sonnet Number 9

'I'm sweating like a pig inside this fucking
hound,' she says.  She reaches up and with
a clumsy paw pulls off her head.  She sucks in
summer air through clean white teeth and lifts
her paw to punch me twice.  My mouse ears shake.
'C'mon, give us a cig.'  'Fuck off,' I tell her,
'we're not on break for hours,' and yet my quak-
ing fingers are already round the cello-
phane.  The queuing crowds can entertain
their fucking selves.  I let the mouse-head fall,
shake out a cig, spark up, kill the flame.
'I love the cunt. He came in me and all.
What can I do?'  'Dump him, take me for life!'
I want to shout.  Fuck it, who'd take a rat's advice?

	                   Simon Jackson


Commended (in alphabetical order):