John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry

1st Prize winner - £500
Peter Read

Dirt

Daily I heard you cough
off the coal through swathes
of 4 o’clock darkness,
before you entered your sealed world.

Burrowing underground to warm the nation,
you brought little home, only dust-
filled eyes, finger nails and hair.

I could not brag your name on schoolyards;
you fought the war with a pick and a spade.

Once, in a library, I blew away your props;
unearthed your name amongst the dead
of a 1930’s disaster. Dug down to find
you’d swapped shifts with your younger brother;
a vicarious killing that kept you alive.

Now, as I hear black cassocked eulogies
for a father I barely knew,
I marvel how you kept your life as closed
as the shaft you inhabited on your knees.

At the grave, as I throw the
statutory earth on your coffin,
you are once again enveloped in dirt.

My grains on your mahogany box,
fall in the shape of rough questions.

 

Sex Education

I was seventeen before he broke his silence.
Even then, he was forced by my school.

In his study he held the lamp plug in his hand.
“Male,” he said, and pointing to the waiting socket, “female.”

Once rammed in, the unsuspecting lamp lit up.
“Sex,” my father beamed. “You won’t be needing these,” he said,
screwing up consent forms to see Bertha,
a Swedish film, meant to banish school yard yarns.

Next day, I gave the lads a knowing wink.
And in my pocket, a thirteen amp plug,
to show the girls I was pleased to see them.

 

The Greatest Poem

The greatest poem I ever wrote
tackled all poetic preoccupations
in depth on the very first line.

Iambic metres here, there and everywhere.
Rhythms and rhymes on words like unadulterated.
Swimming with similes, dripping with rippling metaphors,
assonance so smooth it slipped you by.

An RS Thomas eeriness; a Charles Causley balladic beat;
a poem to make the angels weep; Seamus Heaney kiss my feet.

The greatest poem I ever wrote
will be my next.