The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Bill James

On Eglwys Ilan

They’ve draped him jackknifed on a barbed wire strand,
as though he’d tried to leap the kale field fence
and come unstuck; but not unstuck, well stuck:
a corpse to daunt the rest, traditional.
His dangling head tilts marginally left,
like upside-down contemplative; his stomach’s
gorged with farmer’s shot and serially
anchored by those busy little spikes,
until, come late October, gales might flip
him off, the maggot residue. Dud venue
for a bread-winner, his gifted stalking
lately put on ’Got the bastard!’ hold.

What will the vixen make of it
when she comes, puzzled, nosing,
lobbied by her peckish family?
Only his brush-tip whiskers shuffle in the wind,
such due and tidy lifelessness elsewhere,
feet neatly paired.

At once she’ll write him off, this bushwhacked mug -
not trouble to come close and double check
i.d. through lordly whiff; nor interview
his open, de-mischievoused eyes. She takes
no warning from her strung-up mate; notes only
a provider snuffed and grasps she’s into
single-parenthood; knows life-style changes
are obligatory. Must get out more.
She needs to moonlight, edge into his role
as pick-and-mixer of the scrag-me weak;
at least until her young are wised a bit,
and pad among dim goslings for themselves. 

Bill James, a part-time associate lecturer at Cardiff University’s Creative Writing department, is principally a crime novelist. An occasional poet, some of his work has previously been published in the New Welsh Review, and he was a prizewinner in the 1998 Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Bill James is also the creator of the Harper and Iles series, in which 18 books have been published, one of which was televised by BBC Wales as Harper and Iles.