The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Jenny Swann

What to look for in winter

Homing,
Look for traveller’s joy or old man’s beard,
for stubbled fields
and wintering geese,
for ricks of corn, for grain and chaff and flowering ragwort,

fieldfare, redwing, thrush,
for withering leaves,
cow-parsnips smelling of earth,

for rooks
in frosted country graveyards,
yews in berry.

Or
orientate yourself for London,
look for the house where you were born,

the out-of-season harvest moon
hanging low, treading ether
over the tower-blocks of Camden.

Look for the skyline
humming now with dusk-twinkle,
pink, grey, mauve, gauzing to purpledom,

look for steam rising from vents,

for figures bowed in on themselves,

for slush-mulched streets,

look for light-flocks,

cluster-berries of shine

bringing you in.  

Jenny Swann’s first full collection, Soft Landings, (Flambard Press) was published in 2002. A short collection, Stay, for which she was awarded a Writer’s Bursary by the Arts Council of England, was published in May 2003 by Shoestring Press. She lives near Manchester.