Second prize in our 2025 Open Competition was awarded to The Meeting by Ion Corcos.
Ion Corcos was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969. He has been published in Best of Australian Poems, Cordite, Meanjin, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain, Southword, and other journals. Ion is a nature lover and a supporter of animal rights. He is the author of A Spoon of Honey (Flutter Press, 2018). @IonCorcos
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The Meeting
A slug crosses my path after rain,
one patch of lawn to another,
drags its body, unhurriedly;
one moment seen, then unseen.
When I was young, I learnt about
the rules of life near the threshold –
where I should stand, what it means
to be mortal – tangled in battles
and the sum of obtuse angles. Later,
the edge, and what lay beyond it,
lay in the hands of a man in a cloak
seated at a table in a winter field
with a near-ended game of chess;
bared itself in the tale of a farmer
who, on meeting Death by a river,
acquiesces to a second rendezvous,
only to run to the next village
where the ferryman, it turns out,
is waiting for him. I spent life
as if I had all the time in the world.
Alone, I stand; the slug is slow.
There is nothing to imagine: the air is thick,
a storm rumbles. The difference
between a slug and a snail is that the latter,
on passing, leaves a shell behind,
the slug, for a brief time, a trail.
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Kit Fan, our judge this year, made the following comment on The Meeting:
Deceptively straightforward, the poem is unafraid to venture into the seen and unseen, opening a portal to re-evaluate a life with minimal personal details that cut to the chase. What seem clichés at first glance become sources of unrest, destabilising our familiar mortal attributes of chess and ferryman, as though they too are caught up in the house of mirror where a slug and a snail look and find each other through the speaker.
Ion couldn't make it to our awards ceremony, so he kindly recorded himself reading the poem:
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 