Third prize in our 2024 member’s poetry competition was awarded by external judge Cheryl Moskowitz to Caroline Franklyn’s poem, Wind Quintet Summer School.
Wind Quintet Summer School
It’s after midnight, our last night.
Since supper we’ve been playing Nielsen
Arnold and Danzi
drinking and laughing
and now someone’s thumping on the floor above
so we pack away our instruments
and creep out of the farmhouse.
Turning into the track
that twists downhill through heavy trees
bats flit over our heads.
We whisper even though
out here
there are no humans to disturb.
It’s warm
there’s no breath of wind.
We lean over a five-bar gate
to a field solid with barley.
The stars are so many
and so near
they are like salt on the tongue.
Caroline Franklyn
Cheryl’s comments on Caroline’s poem were as follows: This poem drew me in from the start and continued to resonate on successive readings. From the title alone, almost immediately we can relate to the closeness that comes of an intensive being together with fellow artists, in this case a summer school for wind instrumentalists. We know we are in the countryside, there is a farmhouse where presumably the summer school has taken place. There is a track that ‘twists downhill through heavy trees’ and bats flitting about. The ‘Quintet’ in the title comes back in the poem as a ‘five-bar gate’ which the fellow musicians/friends, are leaning over and immediately we think of a musical stave made up of five lines. Wind too flows through this poem, in subtle, and effective ways. Even with instruments packed away there is music. Bats flit, the friends whisper, and the wind is there, but without breath. And then finally, that devastating last image. The group, who will soon be departing, are gathered together under the summer night sky alight with stars that are ‘so many/and so near/they are like salt on the tongue.’ I think of salt of the earth, salt of tears, salt as being the very essence of life itself.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 