Competition: Oldie
IN COMPETITION NO 123 you were invited to write a poem called' Sleepers'. The entries were startlingly good.
'Nor can I overlook,' concluded Mary Holtby, 'The cost of fatal dozing / While in the bath reposing, / Which is? To drown my book.' Alison Prince beauti-fully caught the refuge in sleep that adolescents take. Jayne Osborn recalled the childhood agony of sleeper earrings and connected it most movingly with her mother's deathbed. Peter Wyton would lie on a summer evening in a warm churchyard 'While the sleepers tell me things'. Mike Law surveyed Arthur and his knights sleeping under Dinas Bran. For John Whitworth it was the gods who were sleeping. Bill Greenwelrs narrator was not at all keen on the sleep of death.
Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the dreamy bonus prize of a Taylor's of Harrogate tea and cake set going to Jim C Wilson.
There's a man beside me slurping Strongbow.
In fact, as he's four feet wide and eight feet high,
he's just about on top of me, so
I tinker thinly with my haiku, neat
and compact by my window. These woods seem
empty but ... THE BUFFET CAR WILL SOON BE
SERVING FILLED SANDWICHES AND SOFT... I dream
of the nearness of trees, a shining sea,
while ranks of screens show spreadsheets, schedules, lists;
a cellphone butchers Boccherini. Sighs,
hints, in unstirring air. Could I use' mists' ?
These searing pains in my neck, knees and thighs!
Useless - my words have congealed in my mouth.
I dumbly squirm, going backwards to the south.
Jim C Wilson
From the outside, our bided lives look just like yours -
We hold down jobs, go down the shops, get on the bus -
But we're sleepers; nascent combatants in the coldest of wars,
You all believe we're like you because you're nothing like us.
Your way of life is our camouflage; complacent and dull-
We watch the soccer, buy a burger, scan the news -
We flex patience like a muscle while deep in our skulls
An act of terror, black as anarchy, imper-ceptibly brews.
We're quite hollow of feeling, for the void makes us stronger -
We fix a coffee, catch a movie, pay the rent-
Time spent amidst the enemy may stretch every day longer
But the waiting, how it strengthens our intent.
Soon we'll be martyrs, crucial cogs in an atrocity -
Our behaviour, all good neighbours, will be famed-
And someone in the Yemen, inspired by our ferocity
Will be schooled in how to fool you all again.
Adrian Fry
They live by night and sleep by day
in dingy flats where fridges smell
of cheese and yoghurt in decay a
nd sets are tuned to TV hell.
Their sleep is near to death except
they sleep in restless fits and starts,
not as the 9-to-5 have slept
but with eruptive snores and farts.
Around their beds the traces lie
of curries, pizzas, doobies, booze.
The ambience is flavoured by
a whiff of the primeval ooze.
Infrequently they'll move their arse
and stagger out and face the sun
and haul their tired limbs into class
and sleep through English 10!.
GM Davis
Sometimes I pass a graveyard in the spring,
And see white stones half-buried in the grass:
The tip of a dead angers broken wing,
Stone symbol of the silences that pass.
I think there are not half so many ills
That side of death, as I have seen on this.
Death is too peaceful to hold mysteries:
For there the pale stones slumber in the sun,
Almost submerged in yellow daffodils;
And there a calm sleeps on when time is done;
A dark that knows no darkness; the still breath
That silence breathes - but here, the city's gloom
Buries us living in its concrete tomb;
And life is quite another sort of death.
Geoffrey Hoffman
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