Di Slaney has won Write Out Loud’s 20th anniversary ‘Echoes’ poetry competition with her poem ‘Dolly Parton’s wig’, written in memory of the late poet Kathryn Bevis, who died last year from cancer two months after publishing her first collection, The Butterfly House, with Seren. Our competition judge, Neil Astley, editor and publisher of Bloodaxe Books, said Di Slaney’s winning poem was “a fitting tribute echoing a poet loved by many – formally inventive and full of surprises like the poems Bevis wrote over the two years she had left after her diagnosis, its butterfly imagery fluttering between the figures of Dolly Parton and her love song ‘Butterflies’ and Kathryn Bevis, whose only collection’s title-poem ‘The Butterfly House’ recalls butterflies (‘their too short lives’) seen at and after the death of a dear friend she had sat with.

Neil Astley added that it was "fitting also in that Kathryn Bevis was known for the great love and generosity she showed friends and family, and this poem is very much about ‘finding light in the dark, celebration in sadness, and joy in the smallest moments’ (words used by Seren’s Rhian Edwards and Zoë Brigley in their own tribute to Bevis). The author of ‘Dolly Parton’s wig’ could have been any one of Kathryn Bevis’s numerous poet friends wanting to remember her so fondly and so much in her style. Having picked the poem as winner of the competition, I learned that this honour went to Di Slaney, who’d had the rare privilege of receiving the gift of the poem from Kathryn telling her she “felt the spirit of Dolly” through wearing the flouncy wig after losing her hair, whereupon Dolly is glimpsed behind her like a butterfly, “small and perfect … the tiny velvet bow all cute and perky”.

Di Slaney lives on the edge of Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire where she runs livestock sanctuary Manor Farm Charitable Trust and independent publisher Candlestick Press. She was the winner of the Plough poetry prize 2022, Slipstream Open 2023, Four Corners 2015 and Brittle Star 2014 poetry competitions. She won second prize in the McLellan English poetry competition 2024. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, widely anthologised, and highly commended in the Forward prize 2016 and Bridport prize 2020. Journal publications include Poetry Wales, Popshot, Magma, The Rialto, The Interpreter’s House, Iamb, Raceme, Brittle Star, Long Poem Magazine, Humana Obscura, Modron Magazine, Aimsir, The Alchemy Spoon and Ambient Receiver. Her collections Reward for Winter and Herd Queen are available from Valley Press, along with pamphlet January Conversations, with Dogs. She is Poet in Residence at Nottinghamshire Local History Association.

Di Slaney said of her winning poem: “I’m especially pleased to have won the competition with this poem dedicated to dear friend and poetry inspiration, the late Kathryn Bevis.  I wrote the poem on a retreat tutored by Jonathan Edwards for the Writing School Online, Kathryn’s wonderful gift to the poetry writing community. Kathryn was part of the programme despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time, and one of our discussions was about her preparation for the Forward prizes where she would be reading her shortlisted poem wearing a beautiful long red wig. We joked about channelling the spirit of Dolly Parton in that glorious wig, and this was the catalyst for the poem which I was able read to her at the end of the retreat. People like Kathryn – generous, brave, funny, brilliant, full of love and optimism for the world – are rare gems indeed, and we’re lucky if we get a chance to keep their echoes alive, sharing their positivity and keeping them close to us. Like many people, I miss her very much. I hope she’s pleased with this win.”

 

DOLLY PARTON’S WIG

by Di Slaney

 

for Kathryn Bevis

 

And when you said you felt the spirit of Dolly

in that gorgeous sweep of auburn light falling

past your shoulders, your warm bright smile so wide

and clear despite every shitty current thing, Dolly

 

appeared behind you, small and perfect, Dolly

in curly backcombed bombshell, the tiny velvet

bow all cute and perky, guitar slung low across

tasselled skirt, humming, long lacquered nails Dolly

 

uses as instrument and reward, tapping you, Dolly

inviting you, sing with me, make our butterflies

and love a real and gentle thing, now your voice

deep and rich, a little quiver reassured by Dolly

 

squeezing your shoulder, her voice sweet, high Dolly

with tall notes vibrating to let us know you’ll think

of us every step of the way, leaving us your words,

your glorious voices, your libraries of imagination.

 

 

Second prize – Esther Lay

Two poems by the same poet, Esther Lay, were awarded joint second place in our competition. Neil Astley said: “The author of two very different poems turned out to be the same poet, Esther Lay. In ‘Jidan’, the mixed-race speaker recalls a cruel childhood nickname (Jidan, Chinese for chicken egg, ‘white on the outside, yellow on the inside’) and turns it on its head, the image becoming symbolic of someone who will always protest, who won’t conform, who is proud to be different, to be herself."

“Her other poem ‘Witness’ takes the first four words of WS Merwin’s four-line poem ‘Witness’ (I want to tell …’) – an imagined future memory of life after climate change recalling the world as it had been – and takes off into an evocation of another life-changing but now vanished time, that of a mother finding herself in another time zone, that of living a 24-hour day with newborn babies. Both poems are sensually rich, every phrase or image on heightened alert to the five senses: sight, smell, hearing/sound (echoes!), taste and touch.”

Esther Lay is a 2025 Forward prize nominee for Best Poem (Written) for ‘The Performance’, which won the 2024 East Riding Festival of Words poetry competition. She is also the winner of the 2024 Write By The Sea poetry prize. She was shortlisted for the Plaza prizes 2025, placed third in Trio International 2024, and fourth and sixth in the Plaza prizes 2024. She has been shortlisted twice for the Bridport prize and longlisted for the Fish prize and Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year. She has had work published recently in Allegro, The Waxed Lemon, The Ghost Furniture Catalogue, Grain Magazine, Broken Spine spring 2025 anthology, and Thimble Literary Magazine.

Born in California, and brought up in Beijing, Singapore, and Sydney, Esther’s Mid-western hometown is Olney, Illinois. She read philosophy and theology at Queen’s College, Oxford, and trained as a classical singer at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After a distinguished 10-year career as a concert soloist specialising in baroque repertoire (under the name Esther Brazil), she trained for priesthood at Ripon College Cuddesdon, where she began writing poetry in 2020. She served her curacy at St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, from 2021-24, where she was the first woman in a thousand years to hold the post. She is now Rector of Wootton, in West Oxfordshire, where she lives with her husband Ben, a serving officer in the Royal Navy, and their two small children.

Esther said: “I'm astonished to have been rather surreally awarded joint second with myself in this splendid competition, judged by one of the great poetry editors of our time. It's given me the chance to put these poems side by side and think about them in dialogue with each other: they are both, in different ways, about the way memories from childhood cling to us and echo into our adult understanding of ourselves.

“My own childhood took the shape of four years in Beijing, aged five to nine, and four years in Singapore, aged nine to 13. The strangeness of being a little blonde girl growing up in a very recently post-Tiananmen-massacre Beijing was not lost on me, but I felt deeply at home in China, and still miss it very much.

"Childhood's most potent memories, whether those of our personal experience or the early years of our own children, are so often tied to food, and in both poems I recall this: in ‘Jidan’, the taste of a winter treat mixes with the taste of polluted air, such a hallmark of 1990s Beijing, and then the memory of breastfeeding my own babies in ‘Witness’. The physicality of ‘Jidan’ is about punishment at school in Singapore, and the physicality of ‘Witness’ is the memory of another kind of physical exertion: the heavy bodily stillness of being with a baby in that strange newborn landscape.

“Both poems, in different ways, are about escaping the past, too - trying to establish an identity as a westerner who still doesn't quite fit properly in the west because of my upbringing, and realising that those seemingly endless months and years of my children's babyhood are now over, and moving into an era of movement and noise.

“Form has always been very important to me. In ‘Jidan’, the poem is written in conversational contemporary language, but the single reference to Shakespeare’s sonnets in the middle is an Easter egg: the whole poem is in a slightly sneaky but deliberate iambic pentameter, like a traditional sonnet or Shakespearean speech, except for the last line. This has three stresses instead of five, to show that the chicken will come out of the egg, inevitably, that identity is more complicated than just what we want it to be.

“We are inevitably shaped by what we leave behind, no matter how fast we run away from it. And to move forward in one's life, even with strong echoes such as these, is to experience a kind of loss, but the privilege of being able to keep moving through time, of having the loss in the first place, is enormous, and I am so grateful to have had a life that has been multicultural and multi-faceted, and to be able to continue to watch this life unfold as I age. Poets work best when we are strangers in the world, and the great secret is probably that everyone has a chance to be an outsider, because everyone is a newcomer to their own present day.”

 

JIDAN

by Esther Lay

 

Banana (xiangjiao): yellow on the outside, white on the inside

Chicken egg (jidan): white on the outside, yellow on the inside

 

Chicken egg: a slur made up for me.

By six, I had scant memories of the west:

instead, the taste of Beijing coal in winter

air, breath visible, skating on foot-thick

ice on the summer palace lake, hot chestnuts

to warm my hands, crab apples’ candied crunch.

My brothers and I flew kites in the high spring winds

in Tiananmen before it was illegal,

played in dusty parks where old men sawed

at erhus, did taichi, their wives on bound feet

teetering past. In Singapore, I read

the Shakespeare sonnets underneath my desk

in moral education class, was punished

till I couldn’t walk. My protest was

to imagine Europe, become high-church, high-culture.

But no matter the gallery or cloister,

I could always hear it: scrabbling on marble

to catch up, skidding round each corner.

The little chicken from inside the egg:

tapping, tapping, tapping.

 

 

WITNESS

by Esther Lay

 

after WS Merwin

 

I want to tell the weight of a newborn

on the chest, the stink of milk-soaked clothes,

of murmuring lonely days in bed

and box sets full for breastfeeding.

But that world vanished, and its fluttering

 

stillness. The noise is bright now,

clattering, children eight and five,

and wheels on things that matter.

My hard-won silences long, solid,

heavy with their unbroken sleep.

 

 

Third prize – Mary Mulholland and Tracey Martin

Joint third in our competition were Mary Mulholland and Tracey Martin. Neil Astley said: “It seemed unfair that only two poets could win this year’s top prizes, so I asked if Esther Lay’s two poems could share second prize, making it possible for another poet to win third prize, but that presented another dilemma: I found I couldn’t choose between Mary Mulholland’s ‘Writing Sisyphus’ and Tracey Martin’s ‘A better door than a window’, both highly moving in their different ways, each carrying echoes of past trials and tribulations: the last line of ‘Writing Sisyphus’ ending with the still hopeful ‘don’t ever give up’ echoing ‘don’t give up’; while ‘A better door than a window’ ends with the title phrase being spoken by the intemperate volatile father to the quietly enigmatic mother, a phrase which sets off echoes back through a poem about a woman who was always present but held back at the same time.

“I was delighted when Write Out Loud agreed to my request that Mary Mulholland and Tracey Martin might share third prize. That gave us five winning poems and five highly commended poems, which seemed a fair balance from my overall selection of 10 really strong poems of an even higher standard than the next tranche of excellent contenders whom I had to disappoint in the end. When you are reading anonymously submitted poems, you end up reading and re-reading a small number of poems many, many times, trying to work out – with nothing known about the writers – how the particular qualities of some poems impress you more and more with each reading, and so it was that I ended up with 10 poems that I felt deserved to be recognised and read by other readers - five as winners, five to commend highly.”    

 

Mary Mulholland – ‘Writing Sisyphus’

Mary Mulholland’s poems have been published this year in Aesthetica, Mslexia, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Stand, Pomegranate-London, and forthcoming in London Grip and Obsessed with Pipework. This year she’s been a finalist in Mslexia, Live Canon and FreeVerse prizes, shortlisted in Fish, Templar, and highly commended in Erbacce prize. She is a former psychotherapist and journalist with a pamphlet with Live Canon and another forthcoming from Broken Sleep.

She said of her poem: “It came from a comment in a poetry workshop that I 'needed to be more angry'. This got me thinking about how hard it can be for quieter/ more subtle voices to be heard, yet how important it is, in this world full of contractions, to write authentically, and to hang on in there, with Sisyphus and Beckett as mantras. Was so happy this was awarded joint-third place!”

 

WRITING SISYPHUS

by Mary Mulholland

 

Perhaps even fish dream of breakthroughs

when they can't see the sky for the crowding

of waterlilies, and the pink flowers scream

as they close their ballgowns by night.

 

The others say my poems need more anger.

But I've lived in warzones. Ordinary people

do ordinary things to a backdrop of gunshot. 

And I remember the nuns. Me chewing cabbage

 

because somewhere someone was starving.

Can't storms and gentle rain both tell stories?

I tell myself it's just a question of waiting.

A lifetime of waiting.

 

Watching the army padre's red-haired boys

climbing the hill. They carried satchels

like tortoises on their backs. I wanted a tortoise

but had to spend my days in a playroom

 

until my sisters came back from school.

The boys each held a hand of their mother,

a pale freckle-faced woman. My mother was dark

haired with red lips. She gave me buttons.

 

Time stands still when you wait, and words

from a heart may alter nothing, yet need to be

written, as a great ball of hope is rolled up the hill,

ears strain to hear, don't give up, don't ever give up.

 

Tracey Martin – ‘A better door than a window’

Tracey Martin “started writing poetry when I was living in Thailand nearly 30 years ago and eventually completed an MA in creative writing with Manchester Metropolitan University. The tutorials were at 1am my time so it really needed commitment to complete the course. Having spent the last three years working in Brussels, where I participated in a couple of poetry readings (in three languages!), I am about to settle in Whitley Bay to enjoy the sea and, I hope, the lively poetry scene in the north-east.

“I'm particularly drawn to poems that contain stories, even if they are quite short. At the moment I'm working on a series of poems about textiles - which I love and am fascinated by - inspired by the podcast Haptic & Hue. Textiles, like poems, contain stories and tell us about the human condition.

“ 'A better door than a window' was written on a poetry course with the wonderful Jonathan Edwards at the Garsdale Retreat. I've always been drawn to the phrases used in speech that are like verbal pictures, especially those used in my own family. When I read the poem I can still see my mum hoovering and my dad saying these words. Since they died a few years ago, I have realised how little I knew about them really, especially my mum. This poem grew out of those reflections.”

 

A BETTER DOOR THAN A WINDOW

by Tracey Martin

 

We always knew you loved her. Even on the days

you threw your Sunday dinner in the bin, 

stormed out the house and left us all 

crying into the gravy.

 

You always sent us out to buy her cards:

birthday, anniversary, even Valentine.

We knew she liked a verse. You’d sign

in capitals ‘from your cuddly bit’.

 

She never called you that, at least

not in our hearing, her hugs

she saved for children, anyone’s, 

her kisses for the tops of babies’ heads

 

And when at parties, high on bitter,

you held her close, she’d say

‘give over’ and shrug herself away

to do the washing up.

 

She kept her secrets tight, hard to know

what she even liked and what 

she pretended to, her busyness

the wall she built around her.

 

Some part of her she never gave away.

Anne, you’d say, as she hoovered

in front of the telly,

you make a better door than a window.

 

HIGHLY COMMENDED POEMS

(in alphabetical name order)

 

Sean Burke – ‘Naming’

Sean Burke was born to Welsh and Scottish families in Banff, a fishing town in north-east  Scotland. He received his first exposure to poetry there, learning Doric Scots and Burns poems by heart for local competitions. After moving to Aberdeen for secondary school, he played saxophone then drums in local bands and spent his remaining time watching Aberdeen FC gradually fall from glory.

He read philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and was awarded an honours degree and a postgraduate certificate; after a brief stint in a call centre in Glasgow, he moved to Milan, Italy, where he worked as an ESL teacher and studied jazz and drumset at the Civic School of Music and Cinema, gigging regularly, if not profitably. For the last eight years, Sean has been a primary and middle school teacher of all core subjects at a bilingual school, with a recent focus on music and drama. He has adapted Dante’s Commedia and The Odyssey for stage performance at early secondary level, as well as arranging a piece of ancient Greek music for a large ukulele ensemble.

His poems have appeared in Orbis, Cake, Squawk Back and Poetry Worth Hearing, and have been shortlisted in a number of international competitions, including Poetry on the Lake and the Hedgehog pamphlet award. He is the winner of the Molecules Unlimited 2025 prize.

“This poem began when I was reading my daughter a story and I was struck by how we still feel the need to teach children the names of animals, despite our ever-increasing distance from the natural world. I am interested in the idea of language as a means of imposing control on experience, which would otherwise be alien and shocking, and how we still seek to reach the raw being of things beyond words while simultaneously backing away from it: the need for, and fear of, communion. These themes are bound up with echoes of stories from the Old Testament, which made a profound impact on me as a child.”

 

 

NAMING

by Sean Burke                                                                                                                                                                           

I.

 

Look. This is the world and what is in it.

Listen. Elephant, lion, flamingo, snake.

Now you try.

 

At first, the mouth will not bend to these sounds

but once mastered, hear how they call

their bodies like lost souls,

see, like lost souls, those bodies appear.

 

I give you this gift as I received it,

with no memory of the cost -

each syllable a rudiment of power,

each name fathered by fear.

 

II.

 

Dawn in the clearing. One by one they entered,

circling their pale and naked half-brother,

all soundless but the birds scattering

in a percussion of wings.

                                               A held breath,

then the cries of each after its own kind

and something summoned from the earth,

from feet to gut, from gut to throat,

then out, up and out, spreading like branches –

my first word, my truest name,

lost before and since; a voice

rising to meet the light,

restoring the silence.

 

 

 

 

III.

 

Once upon a time there was a gardener

and this gardener was also a namer of things

(for without names there is only chaos

and no garden can be where chaos is) -

so he named his garden out of chaos

and the name he gave you and me

was the same name he gave the soil,

that from which other things grow.

But now he had mastered his garden

there followed a kind of paralysis

and he thought, There is something missing,

something in the chaos that was

that is missing. It is, perhaps, a sense of urgency

not to be found in the orderly seasons,

in my obedient and contented creatures.

 

Once upon a time there was a snake

 

Jon Hart – ‘Float’

Jon comes from the south-west of England, where the end of the M5 meets the river Exe and the Holden hills. Poetry has been essential to his cultural life since teenagerdom: reading, listening, gig-going, classes. 

For Jon, writing is an important release from the demands of work (where written communication carries a different kind of weight). With his sixth decade starting to appear on the horizon, he nonetheless regards himself as still at the start of the poetry trail and remains continually surprised by the different emotions that patterns of words on a page in skinny books are capable of producing. 

Key themes that he has been exploring include looking at memory, and our complicated and unresolved relationships with the past. He’s at his happiest near or in water: camping on St Agnes in Scilly, walking on Cornish cliffs, swimming year round off Devon beaches or in Dartmoor rivers and pools, mulling over the next line.  

 

FLOAT

by Jon Hart

 

At this time of pre-dawn, the grey light is rich

            in potential, with, say, a south-westerly breeze

 

and the prospect of infinite sky, or else a fog rug

            hemmed by the river valley with grey until noon.

 

The mind anticipates a sound unheard for twenty years:

            the electric hum and glass bottles of Ray about his rounds,

           

then, in the pause before the radiator’s metallic tick,

            imagines echoes of other sounds, maybe not there:

 

children not grumbling awake in the room above,

            tired house guests not shuffling on the dark landing.

 

Next, before the day begins, rest, let memory think

            things are as they were, foolish acuity still intact.

 

Go, glide from bed, drift downstairs. The dark hall.

            The front door left open to a silent street. The empty step.

 

 

Paul McMahon – ‘Lake Michigan’

Paul McMahon is from Belfast. His debut poetry chapbook, Bourdon, was published by Southword Editions. He was awarded the Keats-Shelley poetry prize by Carol Ann Duffy. Other poetry awards include first prizes in The Moth International, The Fingal, The Westival, The Golden Pen, The Plaza (20 lines), The Nottingham Open, and The Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Collection Prize. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Poetry Review, Rialto, London Magazine, Threepenny Review, Stinging Fly, Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, and The Best New British and Irish Poets. He said of his poem: “I’m glad it was appreciated! It is based on real events that I witnessed.”

 

LAKE MICHIGAN

by Paul McMahon

                                                                                             

As I went outside and looked across Lake Michigan

the February rain in seconds numbed the skin on my face

while the winds ran through the trees surrounding the cabin

like wolves at the end of a bad winter when the only taste

of blood they remember is the old and the runt of the litter

and the sky overhead was plummeting to level the earth

as I ran back inside, barred the door, and twisted the dead

lock into the frame as I’d do back during the Troubles

when the sound of screeching tyres corralled rioters

into the open wasteground at the back of our house

and I’d shut the curtains and hit the deck as they sped

up the back path – the rioters and the armoured police jeeps –

like the hail-filled winds that blew in off Lake Michigan,

the echo of them battering the ground the way the police

battered those rioters trapped in the dead-end outside

our kitchen window back in Belfast – their howls the same

as those winds that ran through the trees, all teeth and no lips,

at the dead-end of winter, when the only taste of blood

the hunter wants is the old and the runt of the litter.

 

Ilse Pedler – ‘Retracing’

Ilse Pedler won the 2015 Mslexia pamphlet competition with The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels and her first collection Auscultation was published by Seren in 2021. She has been shortlisted in the Bridport prize, the Rialto Nature and Poetry prize and the National Poetry Competition, came third in the Magma competition in 2023 and recently won the Ver poetry competition 2025. She works part-time as a veterinary surgeon in Kendal and leads Dove Cottage poets at Wordsworth Grasmere and also organises poetry events at the Farmer's Arms community pub near Coniston. She is the poet in residence at Sidmouth Folk Festival and her greatest satisfaction comes from leading workshops for people who say they can't write poetry and then write the most amazing poems!   

“My poem ‘Retracing’ is part childhood memory of being brought up by strict parents in a house that always seemed to be on their side and part imagining what it must be to live in a darker more menacing environment.”

 

RETRACING

by Ilse Pedler

 

Take my hand –

is that how stories begin,

the warmth of a palm

as armour to remembering?

 

Step onto the brown and orange vinyl,

look right – do you see the breakfast table

with its fake wood top that tilted?

Which side did you sit?

I can’t remember you there,

I can’t remember any of us sitting together.

 

Walk forward three paces,

look left through the frosted glass

at the blur of the living room,

check for the shape

shift of bodies beyond.

Slide the door open,

do you remember the rumble it made as it moved,

however gently we tried,

like it was clearing its throat before an announcement?

 

On the left, the polished dining table with its lace tablecloth,

the glass cabinet with the good china,

on the right, the high back of the red Dralon sofa.

Is that your heart beating faster,

are your eyes, like mine, flicking

to the upstairs door,

are you measuring the steps,

four or five at most,

do you remember how hurrying on the sprung floorboards

set the china rattling its teeth

grinning its grin,

are you making yourself

 

insignificant?

 

Hold your breath

I am behind you,

we are nearly there

reach out your hand

trembling is allowed now

feel the white plastic handle

turn it.

 

Turn it.

 

 

Thea Smiley – First Migraine’

Thea Smiley is an emerging poet from Suffolk. In 2024, her poems were shortlisted for the Frogmore prize and Second Light competition, commended in the Sonnet or Not competition, and she was a runner-up in the Metro poetry prize. 

Her work has previously been shortlisted in the Live Canon Collection competition and the Bridport prize, longlisted in the Rialto Nature and Place competition, and commended in the Hippocrates Prize, Poets and Players, and Ware Poets competitions. Her poems have been published in magazines including The Alchemy Spoon and Butcher’s Dog, and in anthologies from Renard Press, the Wee Sparrow Press, and Arachne Press.

She was recently chosen as a recipient of The Literary Consultancy’s Free Reads Scheme in partnership with the National Centre for Writing and funded by Arts Council England, and is working on a pamphlet and debut collection.

‘First Migraine’ describes the disorientating moment when, as a teenager, she experienced her first attack. Although infrequent, these debilitating headaches have continued throughout her life, and she is interested in exploring the condition through poetry.

 

FIRST MIGRAINE

by Thea Smiley

 

Thigh-deep in the pool, skin rising into goose pimples,

I squint as my mother slips into her element

 

and is off, trailing a silky ripple, leaving me blinking

in her wake, as sun pours through skylights

 

like molten metal, dazzles across the surface, reflections

shimmering over the tiles in shoals, and the air

 

echoes with voices, clatters with slaps and splashes,

shouts rebounding off hard surfaces.

 

I edge in deeper, flinching as the cool water inches up,

slops against me, darkens my swimsuit.

 

I keep my arms close to my chest to warm my body,

hold my breath against the stench of chlorine,

 

which stings my nose and brings back the image

of a green sea, a drowning figure

 

floundering in a poem studied just the year before,

the horror of young men blinded, blood-shod.

 

I push through the water towards my mother

on the far side, her cupped hands scooping

 

a clear path through sunlight, soft waves yielding

before her, lapping at her chin, her lips.

 

I stand, unable to duck down, dip my shoulders in,

or lift my feet to float, as the lights begin

 

to descend, hang like a curtain, its geometric pattern

sparkling, eclipsing sight in my right eye.

 

Shrieks echo as bodies puncture the viscous liquid,

small limbs leap and curl into falling bombs,

 

a whistle stabs through my skull, a shout rings out

like a bullet, and I am swaying, sea-sick,

 

stumbling in the shallows, as my head starts to thud

like the boots of an approaching army.

 

Write Out Loud is preparing an anthology containing the winning, highly commended, and other poems from the competition. Look out for more information about the anthology in due course.  

 

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY MULHOLLAND: XAVIER BONFILL

PHOTOGRAPH OF ILSE PEDLER: CLARE PARK 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Background: Meet Neil Astley, celebrated Bloodaxe editor - and our competition judge