Second prize in our 2024 Open Poetry Competition, chosen by Kathryn Gray, was ‘Why do you want that expensive watch when all the sky’s a clock?’ by Hilary McDaniel.
Kathryn commented on Hilary’s poem that:
“I must confess a natural gravitation to this poem, having a predilection for popular culture. How wonderful to discover icon and famed watch enthusiast James Dean, the obsolescence of the analogue LeCoultre he was wearing at the time of his fatal car crash at only 24 years old, and the Dean Museum in this atmospheric, small but perfectly formed tour de force. Here’s a poem about time, and falling in and out of time, that conjures place so effortlessly that it inspired envy. From the very first reading, I felt as if I were standing next to the speaker, feeling the chill of the sky – ‘cold, clear crystal’ – and watching the ‘belts of shadow’ pass over the land. I have never been to Fairmount, Indiana – or driven down Highway 26 – until now. This is a poem that takes you there and somehow – through sheer skill and measure – won’t let you go.”
Why do you want that expensive watch when all the sky's a clock?
What makes the cornfields happy, under what constellation ~ Virgil
James Dean's image was used to advertise a watch
just when their use began to fade into the digital age.
Same model, a gold LeCoultre watch, missing a band,
was added to the Dean Museum in Fairmount, Indiana.
In the morning here the sky is cold, clear crystal,
the horizon deepening dark against the digits,
the stars pale at the hem in a circle. Looking west,
the direction the meteor shower will come from
in August in the right periphery, at hands ticking
where they intersect, before the sun rises or sets.
Hours and minutes shift. Green men, lions, symbols
rush down the center line of highway 26. When you
drive away, steer straight west on the compass-rose
of imagination, across belts of shadow. Fields of corn.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 