FIRST PRIZE
Jennie Osborne 
FIRST TO BLINK
And on the rain-slick road in front of me
white-staring staring me down
daring me down not moving
luminous in the moment in the car headlight
forty-mile-an-hour moment
flower-face feather-face
saucer-starer Blodeuwedd
taking me in
taking my lethal metal jacket in
and not moving facing me down
claw gripping carcase
pinning me down
till I blink brake swerve
into the risk of oncoming
lifts upward like a leaf
letting go of gravity
curd of mist
of white ash
dissolving to night to drizzle
blurring to peripheral
talons ungrasped
letting me run
leaving me smeared
furred and bloody
on the road
SECOND PRIZE
Roger Elkin
Fishing the Khabur River, Syria
This was once our sacred river,
so sacred that we were forbidden
even to drink from it.
Yet today we fish in it.
See Youssef there, waist-deep,
straddling mid-stream, braced against
the current under the arching bridge
where the river swirls quicker, darker
in curdled eddies that chunter the pebbles
shuttling forward and catch whatever
rattles snagging downstream.
See how his back tenses, his muscles
defined beneath his splashed didashah,
one arm reaching out, the other anchored
with twined sisal to the bank-side, and he’s
stretching and straining, his fingers seeking
beneath the chilled depths in a leaning feel,
the water suddenly muddied as if by blood.
And he has one. A heaving haul, struggling
to make it secure, dragging in – heavy, slow –
fumbling its slipping dip, and passing it back
to the bank-side down our line of men where
they lift it, up and over, then across, one after
the other, wet forms glistening silvery
till placed with dignity face down.
Four times today we have done this –
Omar, Khalid, Sayeed, Ahmed –
and now the boy Mohammed.
But for Rasha and Almira, our mothers,
it is too much. They drop their heads, turn
backs, and melt away home,
their abayas closing in on them
like closed doors as they go.
Surely Allah has forsaken us.
See these five,
hands tied behind backs
where the bullets found their zero.
THIRD PRIZE
Jed Myers
A Calculus
In the gene-and-protein-laced saline
dark of our cores where we’re drawn
toward one another, a calculus runs,
out of all consciousness – and it isn’t
ours, this gift in us for tracking
the arcs of each other’s lips coming close,
for plotting the docking of tongues – it is
the same genius honing the ocelot’s
pounce, choreographing the balletic
dip-turns of swallows, lathing
the leaps of dolphins . . . It can derive
the contour through time of our touch
as it graphs us from inside, mapping
the possible into the moments ahead,
toward our confluence, fluid nexus
where feeling and meaning meet. Invisible
under the skin, there are adjustments
subtle as in the wings of peregrines
while in near-suicide plummet
toward hot-blooded sustenance. Such is
desire’s complex precision – imagine
this apparatus, weightless, translucent,
braiding the helices of our wants
beneath our awareness, weaving us,
the rivers we are, into our convergence,
our intricate swirls of silts, our crisscross
dazzle of currents . . . And it will
ever be missed by us, though we live
and search and kiss by its secret
axioms, its silent eloquence – elegant
integral of fierceness and care, give
and seize, love and hunger, selfless
offering and that essential despair.
JOINT FOURTH PRIZE
Shirley Percy
Entering the room
seeing
easy chairs, table,
textured curtains,
vase of fragrant
freesias, all
in perfect order,
I sense
the moment
before that door
opened; before trivial
footsteps pattered
across the threshold;
before disparate
thoughts made wispy
currents
in that perfect
oneness of objects
existing together,
when silence
communed with itself.
JOINT FOURTH PRIZE
Julian Flanagan
Somewhere There
Where did I lose the blue felt glasses case,
yellow-stitched with my daughter’s erratic precision?
It was in my loose pocket
as our party walked Auschwitz,
the mausoleums of hair and shoes, callipers and spectacles,
then the first, workshop gas chamber.
It was clutched love in the Birkenau afternoon
along slide rule tracks
to the chamber-troughs at the birch line.
Even in night returning past The Ramp
where they’d divided the useful from the weak and young
it was never quite overwhelmed.
Not then, but now I hope, perhaps,
it was not lost on the coach, or in my room
or the hotel bar’s two-beer sanctuary
but its yellow star-crossings are somewhere
in the barbed acres, somewhere there
is my daughter’s stubborn kindness.
JOINT FOURTH PRIZE
Kathy Miles
Playing Chicken
A cautious boy. They called him ‘chicken’
because he wouldn’t be drawn into picking
the short straw, to dash on railway lines
or dart across the road for a childish dare.
He played the cello at school. His frail
uncertain fingers unsteady on the strings,
a long gold slur of chords burring round
the playground in the diffident heat.
Outside, girls skipping, the crump of tennis balls,
a laze of bees bumbling the dusty window.
He grew tall, strong armed, and wanted more
than Dvorak and Vivaldi, wanted to belong
to the boys who taunted his timid past,
yearned for excitement, the thrill of action.
No chicken now. A soldier sweeping mines,
detector held out rigid as a bow
in his steady hand, the weight of others’ lives
pressed down on his young shoulders.
No chicken as he stepped onto the scrubland,
as his feathers unravelled, his wings flew,
and the hero of his blood scattered
like ghost-notes into the arid air.
JOINT FOURTH PRIZE
Denni Turp
Peace Crane
I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.
Sadako Sasaki
Red-crowned cranes bob their splash
of colour in the monochrome landscape
of the Japanese winter on Hokkaido island
in the snow.
They follow every mirrored prancing step
in synchrony, black legs elegantly dancing,
long black necks curling fluid sibilance
with every bow.
Forever is the theme that fills their ballet,
every jump and wingspread black and white
an echo of their voices taking turns to call,
to know
the other sure and certain in the turn and float.
Close on the magic thousand gather here,
breath misting upward from their skyward bills.
Stately, slow,
they stand to still their dance and fold their wings,
while far away cross the world, Excel is busy
with the arms fair in full flow,
and pink paper cranes hang on strings to fill the quiet air
in the restaurant below.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 