Week 24 – Photograph by Chris O’Connell
Well what can I say, a fabulous ten poems in this shortlist, some humorous, some dark, however there can only be one winner and this week the vote has gone to Jenna Plewes for Centred. A close second was All things come by Michael Docker.Well dome to everyone who entered and to those who took the trouble to vote. Congratulations to Jenna Plewes.
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Poem 1
Spider
A fossil preserves a life that is long dead.
Deceit preserves a love which is not fed.
It is fool’s gold around an ammonite
Where truth is sealed in coils of stone
Whose gold is lost but never gone.
To reach this find a web must be undone,
A spider’s web which sparkles in the dew
Reminding me how trapped I feel with you.
An empty husk drained of all true emotion
Made of things past, devoid of all devotion.
Which to save, the permanent or transient?
An ammonite preserved in pyrite or
the gossamer strands of beauty infinite?
Spider you can weave your web a new,
Just as I could leave and find a love that’s true.
Clint Wastling
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Poem 2
Updraft
In Australia you frightened me,
I would back out of a room
or freeze by a fence,
but here at home
outside in my garden,
my safe space,
I allow you freedom,
admire the complexity, precision
of gossamer threads.
It is your choice to stay,
to entertain and enthral,
to refuse to go kiting
seduced by a jet stream.
Eileen Carney Hulme
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Poem 3
All things come…
I wait.
Waiting is what I do
While light rises in the air,
Stillness settles
And my careful work surrounds me
With its light-catching
Beauty for those who see,
Life catching
Terror for those who don’t.
I wait.
My life is made of waiting,
Waiting and watching,
Making and mending,
surrounded by light,
centred on darkness.
I wait.
All things come to those who wait.
Michael Docker
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Poem 4
Trapped
Gone by the time I wake
she leaves a dew drop dusted
Silver shimmering web
glittering in cold morning sun.
Concentric circles
anchored from the centre
by high tensile threads
hold the fragile firm as a breeze blows.
In a concrete corner
spider sits waiting silent
patient watching for
a jerk on the line.
Sure enough by mid morning
a line of tiny still carcasses
small but tasty
line the walls of the web.
Andy Scotson
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Poem 5
Black Star
She has spun a galaxy from her star
and hangs, a black hole, at its core
silent, waiting for ventures to enter
the netted lattice of her constellation.
Dew stars hang in the zodiac lines
as a misty nebula radiates its white
birthing cloud of chaste pearl stars
obscuring the thin trained lances of
lustred green wands, Chiron shadows,
on which her galaxy hangs invisible
to the unwary insect star ships seeking
sustenance as their day explodes.
Carolyn O’Connell
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Poem 6
Centred
The moon is full
I cut the threads that cobweb my mind
balance myself in the centre of my world
reach into the core of my being
spread my limbs like a dancer
float in space
anchored by the few essential threads
that keep me safe.
My web lays silver veins
on the orb of the moon.
Intact and separate
I wait.
Jenna Plewes
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Poem 7
I am The Spider
I am
Like the spider –
The Araneidae.
You see a woman in her home
And you are deceived, just as the fool fly.
I built,
Like orb weavers,
With what nature gave me.
Disguised in the environment,
Is a predator patiently waiting.
The fly;
I’ll catch in time
My prey here in my trap.
Wrapped in sticky silks, strong and soft.
He will struggle…
And fail!
And he will die.
A.E. Nicholas
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Poem 8
Spiders
Dad didn’t like them either: unpredictable,
wriggly things, frizzy in their busy-ness,
with seeking feelers and bended legs;
their quicksilverness in turning into ball
or escaping in swathed veils of web;
and abseiling down on air in starts and stops,
their snapped trails snagging in his hair.
Their suddenness from box or pot
ambushed his gangling walk; threw
shadows where he dared to square his boot.
That dash of black or brown panicked him:
he feared to tread – squelch, squish – in case
he slipped: their death somehow anticipating his.
So trapped them under clarity of glass:
that way managed their activity. Fitted lids, screwed
fast, and watched them skirting the curve
and scrambling crab-like in some tragic dance.
His eye bent level with the held-up jar,
he fed their fear. Must have seemed like Gulliver.
They stayed alive for days on dusts of nothings,
till dried to skin, paper-thin; pale veins;
stick limbs dangling, angular, akimbo
as if caught mid-stride to freedom.
So it became with him those last three months
of bed-baths: his trailing web of being; limbs
hanging hopeless/helpless; staying alive for weeks
on nothing; trapped by the clarity of where he’d
slipped, panicked by the suddenness of his
sliding path to death; his freedom-fear.
Roger Elkin
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Poem 9
A Good Simple Structure
A spider’s web twinkled at me
When a blaze of autumn sunlight
Came through the gaps of the weave.
All, could see how you made it appear
Imposing style and exactly how many rooms,
An extraordinary snare attracting many?
Weaving is normally two distinct types of yarn
Such a great job, a fine art of a seamless web.
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Poem 10
Sleeping Beauty
She succumbs to sleep –
dreamless, weightless being,
barely brushing
distant whispers of dawn’s milky breath.
He fears her darkness –
an unconscious spirit,
subtle snuffling
lost amongst the closing garden gate.
Vibration spins her –
drenched in pearls of morning light,
her body coils
belly swollen with a thousand eggs.
Revulsion bates him –
sticky fingers sucked wrinkled white
shred silken threads
heart dancing with spinning beats.
She succumbs to sleep
Hannah Teasdale
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