Winner

These Are The Women

by Nicole Coward

On the day of your Mother’s funeral,
These are the women,
Who showed up in the brutal blue half-light of early morning,
Buttering bread and piecing together sandwiches,
Boiling water for tea,
The movement of their hands,
Cupping your tattered heart,
As the weight of grief tore at your edges.

These are the women who across the seasons,
Bear witness to snail trails of tears
Sliding into nests of unkempt hair,
Their deft hands folding washing,
Arriving unprompted with a casserole, a plated roast, flowers, cigarettes, a slab of fruit cake,
These are the women who stand and wipe dishes, wring out dish cloths, The women who see what needs doing, and turn up, and do it.

These are the women who share joy,
As it threads it’s way like water,
Spilling into life’s crevices,
Shared meals, throaty laughter, baking with smears of jam,
The hilarity of toddlers, growing children,
The women who press twenty pence pieces into sweaty palms,
And send kids to the shops for sweets,
Pacing kitchens, holding each other’s babies,
Moments like light refracting on the dew of a spider’s web,
Knitting a lace of beauty across history.

These are the women who can read you,
By the angle of your head,
As you stand at the sink washing dishes,
The women who will know your thoughts, as your glance slides off their faces,
Who can smell the intimate details,
Of the battle beneath the sunlight falling on your skin.

These are the women who show up for your hard moments,
And hold it as a privilege to walk beside you,
The women who carry each other across the decades,
Through their own faults and broken imperfections.
These are the women
Who love each other always and anyway,
These are the women who love you just as yourself.

Second prize

She’s Never Seen The Mummy

by Liz Kendall

Regressing, we watch the films of our adolescence together again.
This time in the home you own with your husband,
in which you raise your children, in which you cope with adult life.
I have not done this.
But at our age we both know death,
and have looked in its face and met its gaze more than once.
When we laugh now it is fuller and freer for the sudden lift of weight:
your anxiety for your children; my blurred vision over my staggering, carrier bag career.
Something sharp is starting a rip, just there where I can’t see it,
or perhaps something tender is squashed already,
and beginning to leak in drips.
What is happening today at school? The teachers are so stupid
and the friends are not the ones you’d choose.

We watch films and talk about them
and in between we talk about everything else
and it is the same language, we need no subtitles.

You told me of meeting someone our age who had never seen The Mummy,
and you followed this shocking revelation with the words:
 “I’ve watched that film every six months since it was released”,
and I laughed, and reached for another handful of whatever
children’s party food we were scoffing at 10am on a Friday morning,
and thought “Yes. That is why I love you. That’s why you’re my friend.”
Because in all the exhausting tangle of ageing parents
and illness and schools and work, real work and motherhood,
high-level motherhood of homemade cakes and justice and consistent patience,
you’ve never neglected Brendan Fraser.
And we both understand that this matters.
This, too, is devotion;
is what makes you such an exceptional woman, mother, wife and friend.
Every little lamb is followed and found, brought back to the fold:
a parable of care.

Before the children, before you wed,
you took a week off work;
absented yourself from your proper, grown-up job;
because the box set of The West Wing’s final season had been released
and you were going to watch it as it deserved:
immersed, in solitude, at home.
You goddess. You inspire me.

We were eleven when this began, talking and watching,
those years of first blood;
learning to cope with it, knowing it would be back,
like Arnie, at inconvenient times with pain like metal fists.
Your fainting fits at the iron’s lowest ebb;
but that tide rose again, and with it your children.
You don’t faint now. Your diplomacy looks like a flag of peace
and you wrap it so gracefully, concealing the sheath
of the sword you hold at your core.

Comfortably we regress; the green velvet cushions familiar,
old actors rewound to their prime, our delight still fresh.
The geeky thrills that sustain us in emergency
for emergency will come: has been and gone
and lurks now, waiting for its overture
on which neither of us has pressed play.
But it is not this day. May it not be today.

We know, we have bled and bled again and we know that these hours,
these sweet hard-soft popcorn moments, are how you keep
sunny and smiling; blond hair and blue jeans and a silver star
sparkling wide on your jumper as though you’d never lost anyone.
We both know that with only real life to live in we would each of us sink.
Give us films we’ve seen before, together,
and books we’ve read before and shared before, together,
before all this life and death came.

Third prize

Farewell

by Kay Wadham

The seat where she used to sit on the lonely cliff
Stands empty now.
She would muse on the rolling waves
And a broken vow.
Still the waves roll in as they did before
But she is gone.

Now he stands alone on the windswept shore
As the seabirds cry.
And the desolate sob that
escapes his throat
Is a last goodbye.