Shortlisted poems (in alphabetical order)

Tony Barnstone

White Fear

They thought they were the big white men, could take
the Japs like shooting monkeys in the zoo. 
Those tiny men were not quite men, would break
like yellow eggs. Uh-huh. They feared us, too.
The white men wouldn't let us near their whores.
But I kept flirting. I was a young blade. 
They made black soldiers into stevedores
and cooks and servants since they were afraid
of giving guns to men they wouldn't let
piss next to them, or sit next to their wives.
To keep the women off us young black males
they said we howled at night. Said we had tails!
I cooked their food. And I kept flirting. Bet
on it. You think I’d stop? Not on their lives.

    (African-American U.S. Marine Corps Messman, Okinawa)

The winner of the Strokestown International Poetry Prize was Tony Barnstone. He is from Indiana, USA, and is Professor of English at Whittier College. His first book of poetry, Impure, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series Prize, and other national literary competitions, appeared with the University Press of Florida in June of 1999. In 2006 he won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry for his manuscript The Golem of Los Angeles, which was published by Red Hen Press in 2007.  .

Peggy Gallagher

The Magician

You’re here again.
With a flick of the wrist
you throw the switch on your own wake.

The dresser dense and pitted with age.
Candles flickering against the window nets.
The polished coffin on its make-shift trestle.
 
Same scatter of neighbours and long-
dead relatives, their susurrus of prayers.
Here’s the part you like best:

The way the grandchildren clamour in
trailing the guttery muck from the cow's drain—
hard to tell fear from excitement on their clear
                                                    morning faces.
What is it? you ask. The air stills.
Three sets of wellies move to the box.

They’re anxious to tell you, bring you the news,
spilling out words like shining coins—the cow, the calf,
the shimmering, slithering river, the red-stained veil,
the heft and bellow of birth, its livid chrism. 
The silk-sleeved calf staggering to its feet.
And Granddad, she licked him and licked him and licked him.

 

David Grubb

Mr and Mrs B Entering Heaven

All the way from Derbyshire with their six grandfather clocks
all telling a different time and all transformed now because
there was no time to tell;

and there was no need for spectacles or hot water bottles or books
and the big bed that was somehow more like a ship of whispers
and things still unsaid;

and whatever would the radio be saying without them as they
gradually moved forward looking for people
they might have known?

Quiet as quilt,
as pillow;
as slippers,
as unmade.
 

Ian McEwen

T’ai Chi in Buena Vista Park

Hard to be sure they aren’t mental
or radio-controlled.
They stroke invisible objects
like desire or fear
or beauty
folded in slow motion around
a white geometry
of curves and flutes.

It’s a kind of dance I suppose
and like whale song might make sense
accelerated to the twitter of birds:
the sparrows that seem to live
on a different time. But there’s no music
unless they hear it in their heads

or think they’re making it.
A long ambient sound
that maybe tunes in at night
like very stretched out foreign radio.

Now they are in my head too.
The vegetable stall man’s flat
hand which says ‘this much’,
the taxi drivers’ arabesque   
frustrations, all the confetti
gestures of the street
describe the shell of something missing
or batter at blurred megahertz
like the caged hummingbird I saw
once, down in China Town.

Iggy McGovern

The Irish Poem Is

a Táin Bó, a Spring Show, a video
a trodden dream, a parish team, a tax-break scheme
a prison cell, an Angelus bell, a clientele
a brinded cow, a marriage vow, a domestic row
a tattered coat, a puck goat, a telly remote
a game of tig, a slip jig, a U2 gig
a restored tower, a Holy Hour, a pressure shower
a ticking clock, a summer frock, a shock-jock
a hazel wand, a dipping pond, a page 3 blonde
a canal bank, a returned Yank, a septic tank
a green flag, a Child of Prague, a Prada bag
a whispering sea, a Rose of Tralee, a transfer fee
a disused shed, a settle bed, a Club Med
a long strand, a ceili band, a one night stand
a ‘barbaric yawp’, a sweet shop, an alcopop
a flax dam, a high pram, an email spam   
a new estate, a blind date, a security gate
a pint of plain, a lover’s lane, a place in Spain
a cold eye, a bittern cry, a heroin high
a Raglan Road, a tractor load, a Da Vinci code
a lake isle, a wooden stile, a paedophile
a night feed, a Rosary bead, a corporate greed
a lonely impulse, a bag of dulse, a fading pulse
a herring shoal, a fox stole, a death toll
a Pangur Bán, a paraffin can, a fake tan
a fire-king, a fairy ring, a bling-bling
a tickled trout, a boy scout, a ticket tout
a wild swan, a frogspawn, a roll out lawn
a lost tribe, a D’Olier Street scribe, a planning bribe
a huge rose, a garden of repose, a wine nose
a whirlpool, a milking stool, a drug mule
a stony grey soil, a three-in-one oil, a Mrs Doyle
a planter’s daughter, a school jotter, a mineral water
a potato pit, a banana-split, a gangland hit
a deep heart’s core, a Georgian door, a quick score
a white muslin dress, an Evening Press, an email address
a newborn lamb, a radiogram, an internet scam
a village master, a sticking plaster, a ghetto blaster
a third light, a second sight, a bungalow blight
a solitary enzyme, a closing time, an end rhyme.

 

Hugh O'Donnell

End House, Gordon's Bay

   Washed out my body lies in weed and grass
    in all the places where we once did pass.
        Ingrid Jonker, Escape

1. Morning and evening we unlock then lock
the length of chain across the driveway -
not that we’ve seen anything suspicious.

2. The juice from the crushed berries by the gate
sticks to our shoes and makes a mess inside.
Avoid them. It’s not our house.

3. At night the sea insists on a big presence
and covers us with the sweepings of the floor.
So far down, we dream and dream.

4. That red stain across the water you noticed
on the way to Hermanus is not shark food.
I’ve made enquiries. It has a name.

5. Evenings, taking the path through gnarled trees
to the restaurant, listen - a man persuading a woman,
laughter round a fire, wave-fall, backwash.

6. This close to the edge
we feel inclined to put down the book and undress;
to swim out with no thought of return.

Orlagh O’Farrell

Skylight

A rickety table with three mismatched chairs,
I’m on the flimsy one, a cushion over its
sagging wicker seat.
Afternoon strikes the marmalade
and makes it glow.
You’re turning Tarot cards
beside a pot of half-cold tea, its
brown lid rattles when I pour.
A dusty spider plant
sends aimless offshoots baling to the floor.
The traffic hums around
the Green, the heroes’ gate.
We’ve endless tea, and Pink Floyd on the stereo
and seagull sounds
we’re high up here, amongst the roofs.

I wonder if
we should go back to bed
your room that’s strewn
with the mattress on the floor, my clothes, my hasty bag
but others come and you
throw down the key wrapped in a sock.       

I want to show you
a bird’s nest you say, when we’re all
sitting round and drinking tea, and you
take my hand and pull me to the room.

I laugh.
I love your country ways.
I’m failing my exams.
 

William Palmer

The Death of Likeness

Wood pigeons feed on the rowan tree;
fly suddenly away
- the thin branches upswaying -
return a moment later, gorge,
the branches bearing down.

They are birds. That is a tree.

Over a mound of earth
a blue plastic sheet is spread,
weighted across its middle
by a plank, one darker knot
in its length, two nails at one end.

The plank is not a path, a ship, a brown, shaped land.

The sheet is not a sea,   
seized and rippled by the eye.
The blue sheet flaps its edges in the wind.
The pegs on the nylon line
Are nothing but white wood and spring.

Her picture and this empty ring;
           
each movement of branch or sheet,
say only - that nothing is
‘as if’ or ‘like’ or ‘seems’.
That nothing is to be, from now,
like anything else at all.

Jane Routh

Field notes

We had talked the evening into bat-light
when he gestured with his eyes Turn; look.
A tawny – flat face against the glass, balanced
on the sill, wings (arms, I almost said) outspread.
Maybe it was a far glow from the kitchen
across indoor plants and wooden stairs drew the owl
as to a roost. An armslength from where we sat.

It is not true they only hunt at night.
The year they were calling from each end of the garden
I saw one slide from view behind the hedge
at noon. And once, blackbird commotions
made me run into the Little Wood: two paces in
an owl dropped the henbird at my feet.
Alive but too ripped and bloodied to save.

The owl kept up its slow beat at the pane.
We continued our talk in quiet tones
and I thought that if I had been the friend
sitting by me, I would have been stricken:
the light gone, the great bird glaring down,
him saying I’ve caused that much pain
and not knowing how to stop.

K.V. Skene

Flying Without You

Point of Departure        Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Cincinnati &
                                        Northern Kentucky and it’s a long, long way without
                                        love – a word I can’t live with
                                        although I keep trying to.  Touch me,
                                        I bend.  Kiss me, I open.  
                                        Want me,
                                        I am warm air rising…

Gate 13                         Even the clock disconnects
                                       as minute by minute 747s
                                       drop out of heaven,
                                       howling,
                                       as I wait (without you) to begin/
                                       to be gone.  The older I get
                                       the more certain uncertainty is.

Take-off                        And the earth turns around
                                       its petrified past.  I slip a ring
                                       from my finger and take myself
                                       (separately, deliberately)
                                        into tomorrow – a detour, a début,  
                                       a divorce.  Flying without you
                                       is being unknown, uncared-for,
                                       in an undiscovered country.

Suspended in Sky       Blue.  The icecold blue
                                        in which  time disintegrates
                                        and thoughts crystal upon conception.
                                        The absolute bluenothingness that is tundra,
                                        permafrost, glaciers smothered in wind,
                                        slippery with snow-melt. The blueprint of a soul/
                                       of a sea
                                       in which wave after wave lifts, turns back
                                       without looking.

Orbital Observation    Underneath our wings
                                        a suicide sky.  Inside my brain
                                        there is no difference between falling
                                        into everything and falling
                                        into nothing
                                        both leave you without a choice/
                                         a prayer.

Re-entry                         Without fanfare the earth rises,
                                        the landscape expands
                                        a little too fast: snowtrails, evergreen valleys,
                                        skyhigh rivers slithering to sea
                                        as small walleyed buildings shoulder
                                        a switchblade highway, swell
                                        to cityscape.

Touchdown                    Flat earth and heavy bodyparts  (Without you
                                        I’m always filling in the blanks with truths that aren’t.)
                                        and time restarts, slow-rolls the concrete runway,
                                        as I lug my overweight carry-on,
                                        my overwrought memories
                                        out the designated door.

Grounded                        Leaving Lester B. Pearson,
                                         streetlights blink a downtown
                                          tattooed in red and gold.
                                          I know what I’m hoping for, holding
                                          my breath for –
                                          arriving (without you) at half-past Happy Hour –
                                          and I’ll knock on  that blue door on Bathurst Street
                                          if without me
                                          is the lonely place you want to be.