Judges Comments
This category probably had the most poems that were directly about the human experience. Both the winner and one of the special mentions are poems directly about death and grief. I found poems in this category held a great reverence for nature. In these poems there is a sensation of returning home to the garden, not for cure, but for comfort. There was also an element of grief for nature in these poems, a question was being asked ‘are we too late?’ In this category I am always looking for craft, I want to see a safe pair of hands taking a well-known idea and giving it new life. The poem telling the bees but, which receives a special mention, does this by ramping up the tension with repetition and a lack of punctuation. The poem fizzes with panic, a not-too-distant future scenario is being expressed. It’s very effective. The other special mention in this category is Inheritance. I carried this poem around with me, returning to it several times, just to re-experience the gentle knowing of grief, a grief of action, of growth, where the size and shape of someone lost is found so wonderfully present in something as simple as a garden planter. The winner in this category, Outside, is a poem about dying. This poem is from a caregiver’s perspective. There is a gentleness to the accommodation the carer is willing to give a person who wishes to die outside, and what that means in terms of protocol and practicalities. I found it gently emphasised the idea that a return to nature in this way is no longer the norm. I was struck in particular by the way this death became something very gentle, almost unseen, unheard amongst the sound of birds and the movement of the trees and I found the image incredibly moving. The poem is so well crafted, you do not see the seams of it. An incredibly strong poem and a worthy winner.
Thank you for trusting me with your poems. Congratulations to you all.
Winner
OUTSIDE – Susan Thomas, Arundel
You say you want to die outside.
I think this is a first
although I do recall long ago
a patient in their bed in the courtyard
dappled by the afternoon trees,
the leaves tinkling like milk-bottle tops
slipping away while they slept.
It was hard to notice, the lack of rise
from their chest, the gentle absence
of breath – replaced by birdsong,
but placing a hand on their shoulder
they could not be woken – it was pretty much perfect.
Now we discuss what we will do if it rains, if it is night,
if the wind blows or the sun screams down
where we will plug in the bed?
Maintenance is called.
A gazebo is erected.
These days it is difficult to connect to the stars,
but we circumnavigate the cosmos
try and get you there, respond to the
primordial pull rather than protocols.
We open the doors, and let the curtains
billow like rolling waves
feel the chill rise of goose skin on our
sleeveless arms, laugh with you as we
wheel your bed over the doorframe bump
into the garden, bringing you closer
to the earth.
Special Mentions
Inheritance – Helen Kay, Crewe
i.m. my brother
You built the planter for your strawberries.
Rich with purpose, you sawed and screwed.
No ripe red hearts in your ark this year.
Your widow gifted me this six-foot box.
It took us a day to empty it of soil.
Bound with ropes it jutted from our car boot.
We snailed along, held up the traffic.
Now it is full again, refreshed with radish,
chives, tomatoes. Your plants are heavy
with fruit. Each bite releases juicy tears.
Knelt by the planter, I see you in its size,
in each slightly crooked splintery edge,
in the excess of screws, in the way my trowel
cuts a smile in the soil, makes way for seeds
telling the bees but – Milla van der Have – Utrecht
sitting in my garden I am not sitting in my garden
nor in any idea of garden nor a stolen garden nor
sitting at all and somehow things should be better
than they are
also this is the year the bees didn’t come
there is a certain misunderstanding about beginnings
and what causes them and I am not sure it’s up to me
to unravel those strands or that somehow I would
prefer to claw the bones from a raven’s belly and start
over again, in reverse this time
also: this is the year the bees didn’t come
sometimes it starts with fire or rain or some divine yet
elemental upheaval but often it starts only when you are
walking down the street and there is a sudden kind of
sinking, like reality giving way around you, something
you knew all along but were somehow too afraid to predict
like the year, also, the bees didn’t come
and then it is just this, this vestment, this outer sheet of life
and I have been shedding time in my garden in my shame-filled
sea of a garden in my walled off angel-bound garden
in my broken sword righteous anger garden in my capsized toy-
build brick of a garden, in my monolith, in my dragon-lair,
my steeled house garden, my catalyst comet struck garden my
counter current cave of a garden that is not now nor has ever
been my garden if only because this is the year
the bees didn’t come
Finalists
A Cultural Exchange – Elizabeth Holt, Hull
My parents visited Monet’s garden, back in the 1980’s,
using their meagre savings to fund a fun retirement
after a lifetime of slaving at two jobs each.
My mother, the passionate gardener, wallowed
in the beauty of water lilies bursting from giant leaves,
wild combinations of colourful flowerbeds – chaotic, free.
My father, the romantic dreamer, watched sunlight
move across water, become merely an impression of itself,
resting by the frilled arch of a faux Japanese bridge.
No matter that it was all false: one man’s imitation of a Japanese garden
seen only in beloved prints; the man-made pond’s surface cleared of pollen;
lilies cleaned of passing steam-trains’ soot, pads polished to a brilliant sheen
by well-drilled gardeners before the artist unhooked his boat from its mooring
for thirty years of long days spent painting a mirage from fresh angles,
in different lights – his own lengthy servitude to the work he couldn’t resist.
Art conveyed what a photograph could not: a promise of natural beauty
in a flawed world made perfect so that one man could feel, then paint, his joy,
translated for others to carry that dream into their own lives.
My parents loved the garden more than its painted impressions,
never put up a print on their conventional walls, never visited a gallery
to see originals, and would not have cared about soot on blooms.
Their joy was found in lived-in industrial heartland, their own back garden,
the hours spent producing masterpieces of colour and scent where family
gathered and dogs played; where the light changed with the sun’s journey
across the same skies watching over people in different countries,
a century apart, each person’s view as valid as the next one gazing
from a French Japanese bridge, contemplating shadows on flower-filled water.
Grow – Joe Spivey, Leeds
Some days I feel like a back garden in November.
My belly is a compost pile of past mistakes
and my bones are fences that lean like a drunk uncle.
This was once a place for childhood adventure.
I ran around my skin like a bee in bloom
and dug holes to find treasure, or Australia,
whichever came first.
As a teenager, I pruned and trimmed myself
down to the stem, cropped vulnerability at the base
and watered insecurity until it ran deep,
determined to grow back box-shaped, storm-proof,
until my 20s came crashing in.
Now, there’s Nextdoor’s whispers in my bloodstream
and my stretch marks have started popping up
like graffiti around the back of a derelict leisure centre,
the final call for life before the train leaves.
But I sacked off gardening a long time ago
and let the weeds and nettles take the reins,
let myself grow without any permission.
On a Wet Winter’s evening in February – Anna Somerset, London
on a pebble-dashed end of terrace, asbestos shack and coal store.
But the garden made one’s heart unharden.
It sat amidst a forest – though London Bridge was down the line,
no-man’s land a colony for foxes and magpies.
forty feet of lawn, a gnarled rose bush, riotous buddleia
and a sad apple tree,
framed by rowans and magical light,
and silence, apart from occasional slowing trains.
I was sold.
“No point busting your ass, cos you’ve got honey fungus”.
Danny next door was quick to gloat that we’d been sold
a pup….
two decades later:
sunshine: purple sprouting broccoli, petunias, peonies, pears,
palms that have jungly intent and two cherry trees
….say otherwise.
A riot of crab apple blossom;
Their orange jelly succour to an older palate.
Children now magicked into adults, the pocket lawn of play now sacrificed,
But rose, jasmine orange blossom exhale comfort to bees, butterflies and me.
Somewhere lies buried an Anderson shelter
Said the brother of the old owner, who came to visit once, worried that
Mr Rawlings had escaped institutional care to hide in our garden.
Digging down to sow more veg, David found a long bone,
Disquiet, and then a collar tag
“Prufrock”
and I realised we had bought a habitat for poets.
Neighbours – Ted Gooda, Billingshurst
The oak at the end of the garden fanfares its familiar trick,
magicking dot-to-dot buds into artistry beyond the Old Masters
in just a few short weeks in spring. Quercus robus is pleasant green.
Meanwhile, the gum tree next door sheds a Tasman Sea
of russet flying-fish out of water. Myrtaceae glows,
mixed in a palette of unknown sheens, and her out-of-season leaves
fall over our fence as if the world has split its seams.
Around the globe, wildfires begin with a flap of butterfly wings.
In summer I watch the gum unravel, stripping off scraggly bark
until she husks in ribbons, naked. Acorns form in cup-caps.
On bright days, the eucalyptus haze trails Blue Mountains
across oceans and I see she still knows her faraway home.
A wood pigeon coos like a kookaburra laughing,
snug and plump where boughs almost meet
our oak tree’s canopy, blending identity. Both trees
stay rooted, impossibly, in fall, when the garden soil
is flooded and mud oozes blood that might drown us all.
When winter grips, I need to stamp to stop the numbness.
Frosted ground is strangely warm through my boots,
as if fury pulses in a sandstorm miles below and the earth
feeds a furnace at its core. Yet across the garden fence
the trees reach towards each other, outstretched limbs
like olive branches, brushing fingertips in the breeze,
soaring above a landscape on its knees.
Digging the family garden – Mary Mulholland, London
My mother refused to dirty her hands
in the garden. As if soil carried poison. From
indoors, she saw squirrels morph into monkeys
she knew as a child. I fly to Guyana after
she dies, hear her in every Georgetown voice.
The air hits me like a steam bath,
I stick out like a chicken in the sea.
A dog barks. My mother told me Warrior
was poisoned. He was found one morning,
stiff in their garden. She lived in a stilt house.
It’s now a burnt field, grazed by a donkey.
At Stabroek Market I gaze at strange fish, flies
feast on dead eyes. The fruit stall sells thirteen
types of banana. I buy breadfruit, think it’ll taste
like bread, am handed green coconut, they say
it’s safer than water. I sip through a straw.
Next morning I trace my mother’s footprints
to her school, pass the law courts, the stories
she didn’t tell me – her father electioneering in red
to win a seat in the legislature, to challenge
the empire of a pink world, but he was no more
than son of an indentured labourer
who believed gardens were where you grew
dreams, that if you scoop stars from the sea
with a bucket you’ll bring laughter into the home.
In the Botanic Gardens, I picture the fête he held
to celebrate his victory. Then six months later,
ten minutes’ silence in the courts. And his house
that stayed silent long after his mysterious death,
and his garden, unfamiliar constellations in the sky.