In this post we would like to share three fantastic poems that earned ‘highly commended’ in our International Poetry Competition.

In The Garden of Fleeting Mutability
by Sharon Black

o many-slippered god
of mouth and mandible, scalloping

straight lines, prongs and curves
while your long green wand pulsates

and swells, each padded segment
a storage house for light

your concertina
meandering under the nasturtiums

attending to each leaf edge
blessing them one by one

transporting silence to a glass pod
to emerge as weightless symmetry

wings closing opening
doors to an unbroken flight path

o teach us how to be the change
dropping quavers

into flower head, tree sap, honeydew
a froth of yellow dandelion

Sanctuary
by Anna Forbes

In the depths of the afternoon
things are turning. It is not
as easy as a word like dying.

That’s what the animals do–
spinning around cleanly
in earthly reversal.

The increments are harder to define
like a series of little wrenches
each one leaving less than what was there

but always a remainder
to be worried and worried down. I
love you I
loved you I

It’s something to do with the light, there
or the differences in night and morning air
but sometimes the wheat that fills the outer fields
is greener than the stirrings of a song
and sometimes blue.

Spell to quell a storm
by Lesley Sharpe

I do not know how amber takes the shape of a grief, or tangles
living creatures as it cools. A single bead might be an amulet,
but grind it with rose oil and honey, mend eye and ear, calm

mourning. If Tacitus is right, amber is to be examined by
the application of fire kindled to a thick and odorous flame, but
this kind of magic is not for me. Nor would I offer the scattering

of beads in the graves of children, though some have left them
there. In my small box I keep the bones of birds, their tiny skulls
to prophecy, will lay them out to ward off ills, though these will

not protect you from your fate – even with your horse saddled,
you won’t escape the ash that falls from the sky. But life goes on.
Take this amber for childbirth, fertility and luck, problems of

the bladder, throat, your mouth. This ancient piece will soothe
a storm in the mind, soothe sorrow, that shadow of the sun we
live with always. Here, take it. Feel its heat in your palm, formed

from the tears of Clymene and her daughters, sisters of Phaeton,
as he fell from the sky, though anyone could have seen that coming.
When burnt it smells of pine, the gardens of the Casa del Giardino.