The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

John F Deane

The Meadows of Asphodel

The gate leans crookedly and blue binding-twine
clamps it against strays. Over peat acres
bog-cotton sways like a chorus of souls arrayed

for paradise, prepared to utter into praise.
In this humped meadow the individual graves
are clothed in dogrose and montbretia, clumps

of soiled-white lilies and the tut-tut-tutting
wheatears. Neglect, I say, and you say
repose, how the dead have abandoned us, become

seeds curled in darkness, their only task to wait
the nourishment and ripening; here it is the living
are blown about by the winds. The stones

with their weathering, their burden of names
and aspirations, face, you say, all in the same
direction, and I say, East, waiting

for that disturbance, the grincing of the gate
when we will all stir out of repose, and lift, prepared
for counting, like pale down shivering before the breeze.

John F Deane founded Poetry Ireland - the National Poetry Society - and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1979. Won the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry 1998 and in 2000 the Grand International Prize for Poetry from Romania. Latest collection of poetry is Toccata and Fugue, New & Selected Poems, from Carcanet UK. Forthcoming collection of poems Manhandling the Deity, from Carcanet, due in June, 2003