Poetry Space Members’ Competition
Back in March I asked for poems on walls. Sorry for the delay. Here are the winning poems from Denni Turp and Diane Jackman .
Building the wall
first you mix the days of the week
not so alarming
then morning and evening day and night
we don’t mention the time
meanings of words drift away baffling
abstractions
talk is plain
familiar objects lose their names
pill
chair
cat
we point at things
other people move into the house into our bed
I am me and
someone else
a simple event becomes a tale
toldinjumbleandcrash
your doily memory
breeds suspicion
I am silent to avoid distress
When we met we laughed and laughed.
Sixty years to catch up, we told each other stories.
We’ll never run out of conversation, we said,
When we’re old and forgetful
We can tell the same stories over and over…
It has not been as we imagined,
building this wall.
Diane Jackman
All Shall Be Well
We saw the message every morning,
clear in letters maybe six feet high,
white paint along the wall beside the roundabout
on our hectic way to Bangor for work and school.
An old wall this one, enclosing all
the grounds and manor of Y Faenol
where so much more than a century of seeming change
had taken issue with its keep-out-peasants height.
Of course, the road we travelled there
and the letters on the wall were young.
All this I knew and understood, as well as that this message
came from writing many years before the wall was built,
and that even here, so sharp against the grey,
that it could never be especially for me,
just that it still in some way had a meaning that made sense,
a tiny shall and well of hope to calm the madness of another day.
Denni Turp
Denni and Diane will receive copies of Chester walls by Julia D. McGuinness.
