The 2013 Gloucestershire Poetry Prize

A suspicious sales-type phone call yesterday evening turned out to be nothing of the sort - instead, I learnt that my sequence, Speaking Raven, has won the 2013 Gloucestershire Poetry Prize (for residents of the ancestral county of Gloucestershire), courtesy Buzzwords, and so takes a final lap of honour here.    

The first part is about watching a pair of ravens flying over the Grwyne Fawr valley in the Black Mountains; the second is in the voice of the raven who, in North American mythology, created the World; and the third is a bit of one-upmanship between the Norse God Odin’s two ravens, whose names translate as Thought and Memory. 

Speaking Raven

I Grwyne Fawr

Sheep have spread their shrunken 

woollens on barbed wire fences,

wisps bleached white by winter sun

imitating lichen hung on blackthorn

twigs to dry.

Delighted by pattern

the wind sends a pair of ravens overhead. 

It thinks they sound like frogs

but to me it’s clear that they are

deep in conversation

their topic a worsening in the weather,

the move of the livestock market

from Abergavenny to Raglan.

Or so I imagine, 

not speaking raven.

II   Light-Bringer

Black with repentance?  Me?

Everything you see I created –  

these hills and rivers, those distant clouds

that might be mountains

I circled the world,

my feathers shed forests

With my beak I mined diamonds 

gritted the slippery sky

While you were blindfolded

and stumbling

I shoved the sun up the chimney

giving birth to Day

My dirt-dark laugh

regurgitates morning

Nights, I spread my wings, my iris

the tireless moon

III  Thought and Memory

Once there were gods

and we served them.  Now we are 

masters of four winds

Feathers and bone, we are the fearless,

tumbling funambulists

stepping on air

There’s more than one darkness.

We are the dark of the shortest day

falling through spring

Mornings

our wings make sooty marks

across the camber of the sky

In our feathers all things are mingled.

We have four and sixty

changings of the voice.

We love to bark like happy dogs

rolling in cloud

waggling our tails

We’re not the souls of fallen soldiers.

We don’t act as omens,

foretellers of doom

Flapping rags and blackened paper,

we are debris at the edges

of the storm

Thanks to judge, David Morley, and all at Buzzwords. 

(There is a raven in the above photo, honest, it's soaring, wings outstretched, over the Dart gorge.)