The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

3rd Prize Winner - Judy Brown

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire. She resumed writing in 2004 after an interval of 13 years (which started after she moved to Hong Kong in the early 1990s). She now lives and works in London. In 2005 she won she won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Forward Book of Poetry 2006 and several magazines. Judy is a member of the committee of Magma Poetry magazine.

Marbles

They cluster like caviar in the tin.
One lay in the mouth of the Chinese bowl
for years, a hint of petillance trapped
in its globe. The grip of the glass held a twist

of iris, a fluke of coloured muscle
in North Sea blue, as cold as holidays.
It looked like an eye gone bad, locked up
in glass, like the dust that’s left in reactors

at shut down. They say, by the time you’re sixty
you need three times as much light to see.
It’s true the calorie count on packets
and tins is puzzling, like tiny knitting.

I search for the fibre to tighten, something
to change to focus the image, but the lens
has lost its flex. There’s just a cut glass inch
between me and the mist. If it slurs

I’ll be stuck. When the sea slips in
to the suck of a wetsuit, they say,
it warms up in no time. Maybe I’ll learn
to see underwater, to bear the lick

of the pool on my eyes, to enjoy the view
of its four bent blue corners. I grope
in the bowl, out of my depth. The blur
blooms wet in wet just out of sight.