The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Second Prize-winner - Jennifer Copley

Jennifer Copley lives in her grandmother’s house in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. A late starter, achieving an MA in Creative Writing in her fifties, she was a winner in The Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition in 2001 with her first collection, Ice. Her second collection, House by the Sea was published by Arrowhead in 2003. Unsafe Monuments, also by Arrowhead, came out last year. She is widely published in magazines, has won a number of prizes which includes being a National Winner in the Ottakar’s and Faber Poetry Competition, 2006. In 2005 she was elected South Cumbria Poet Laureate.

 

On Shyness

My mother was shy,
my father was shy,
I am shy.
Everywhere I look for shyness,
catch it in the flick-fin eyes of fishermen
or the lowered gaze of mariners
who run away to sea to be shy because
the sea, though you would not know it,
is very shy. Its waves hide behind each other
when bold feet come splashing.

The wind is shy but birds are not shy.
Brassnecked, they fly where they please
and the wind, being shy, has no idea
how to shoo them away.
On the whole, animals are not shy
with the exception of horses -
so insanely shy, they shie from everything.
Hiding inside their glossy coats,
forced over jumps and along busy roads,
all they want is to be back in their meadows.

I met an executioner once.
He was extremely shy.
He hid behind his black mask,
wore black gloves on his shy fingers,
whispered to me that he was sorry
but he had a job to do.
In a little while, he said,
you will walk on the sea shore
among the calm, clear pebbles
who are the unshy eyes of the dead.