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Mary MacRae’s second collection
published Aug 10 by Second Light Publications. See order form (pdf file) for discount offers
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Round 10, Month 10: this month, our judge is Hylda Sims. Her selected winning poem is Midnight Robin by Maureen Weldon. Poems by Angela Kirby, Maggie Sawkins and Veronica Zundel are commended.
While the sky shimmers like shot silk.
I count the chimneypots,
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
On my kitchen table, sheets and sheets
of screwed up poems.
Tomorrow I’ll flatten them
for shopping lists.
While perfumed smells of hyacinths
bring memories of my mother;
‘they make lovely Christmas presents’
she would say, as she potted and tended.
The evening moves along.
The moon a half golden bracelet.
The sky cluttered with stars.
All is still. No cars. No trains.
And in this stillness,
the midnight robin sings.
Poem published in Crannog 18, 2008, ISSN 1649-4865;
and in Bolts of Silk, 2013
Judge’s comment:
I love this poem for its elegant, unsentimental description of a moment in one’s life both ordinary and magical and familiar to most of us. I like the double entendre of the ‘screwed up poems’; the alliterations; the ‘cluttered sky’; leading us to that unexpected, simple and uplifting last line, ‘the midnight robin sings’. Truly a small gem of a poem!
apologies – due to a technical error there are only 3 commended poets this month:
Trizonia, by Angela Kirby
Zones of Avoidance (a short extract), by Maggie Sawkins
‘Dear God, all the children can run except me’, by Veronica Zundel
