Beginning Anthology

from

Frosted Fire FIFTH Annual Single-poem Competition 1 June — 30 September 2024

Alphabetical list of poets

This lists all the leading poets who wished to have their successful competition poems published in the anthology. Each is linked to their poems and audio.

Barbara Hickson, Carol Caffrey, Cecilia Rose, David Dawson, Gabriella Stephenson, Jan Edwards, Jason Lytollis, Joan Baxter, Jodie Duffy, John Newton, Judith van Dijkhuizen, Kerry Darbishire, Louise G Cole, Lucy Crispin, Margaret Morey, Paul McDonald, Sandra Galton, Theresa Gooda, Vanessa Horn
indicates one audio of a poem.

Thank you to all who entered the The Beginning of the End single-poem competition which closed on 30 September. Following are the names of all prizewinners and commended poets. Anthology publication will follow for each of them

1st Prize £350: Lucy Crispin
2nd Prize £150: Jodie Duffy
3rd Prize £75: Gabriella Stephenson
Special Audio Prize £100: Kerry Darbishire

Runner Up Prizes £25: Carol Caffrey, Jason Lytollis, Judith van Dijkhuizen

Highly Commended text: Joan Baxter, Theresa Gooda
Highly Commended audio: Barbara Hickson, Joan Baxter, Margaret Morey, Theresa Gooda

Long Listed: Andy Craven Griffith, Cecilia Rose, David Dawson, Jan Edwards, John Newton, Louise G Cole, Paul McDonald, Sandra Galton, Vanessa Horn

Adjudication of main prizewinners:
by lead judge Katherine Parsons

First place, text: ‘A box of frightened’ by Lucy Crispin
‘A box of frightened’ is a beautifully simple, stark, quotidian representation of care at its most intimate: the small things placed tenderly within reach of one whose reach is increasingly limited. 

First place, audio: ‘Beneath a paper sky‘ by Kerry Derbyshire
This moving narrative poem brilliantly portrays an oncology waiting room and its occupants’ fear and vulnerability. It just missed the text long list because of some obscure references. But the audio’s momentum and vocal expertise turns those references into added strength and depth of meaning.

Second place: ‘Wreck’ by Jodie Duffy
‘Wreck’ is a poem that bears reading and re-reading: it is a wonderfully constructed piece. The first and last lines balance and perfectly bookend an imaginative metaphor – one written so vividly as to be made imaginable. 

Third place: ‘Caddis larva’ by Gabriella Stephenson
‘Caddis larva’ is full to the brim with gorgeous language that reflects – and quietly inspires – a deep attention to natural world with gems such as ’the earth shifts in pen cap fragments’ and ’This tessellating case of Here’. 

Competition intro & rules

Ticking Clock Anthology 2023 Every Breath Anthology 2022 Transformation Anthology 2021
Wild Words Anthology 2020

Theresa Gooda

Birth Day

Her hair catches fire. Curls fry to copper wire
when she blows a feeble spit-filled wish
over five candles. That’s when it begins.
He follows her inside the sweet shop while
she buys sugar mice. He seems nice, notices
the burnt tresses. It’s her first time

alone outside home. She plays grownup though her
mother watches from the window, not ready to cut
apron strings. He’s still there later, parked outside in
a van: predatory waiter. The policeman
brings bewildering conversations about strangers
she can’t reconcile with respecting elders. She’s done

wrong, it seems, because it changes everything. Her
hair is scissored into a shiny pageboy trim.
Paul Bailey draws diagrams on the school desk
of how babies are made. It sounds like poppycock.
On the way to school, something in the bushes.
Rustlings, sharp intake of breath, flash of pale flesh.

She thinks at first he must be in some distress, before
the rude sting of understanding. Years pass. She takes
matters into her own hands: red streaks, punk-dyed.
The next jeans-down clown freak taps with flashlight
on the glass window pane at midnight. She screams
alone in the all-female, off-campus student halls.

A magnet for this sort of thing, unfortunately.
The fed sighs. Such a fuss. He was only outside looking
in, after all. No harm done. All sorts of cuts after that.
Loose waves, bleach-blonde, cropped, bobbed, shaved.
It doesn’t matter. She still loses count of the violating.
Look, don’t touch, she wills her hair to say.

Grey-haired, she trades her plaits for venomous asps.
She makes a wish. Nothing has been extinguished.
Now girl turned crone can spit, burn, turn them to stone.

Theresa (Ted) Gooda debut poetry pamphlet Silence & Selvedge was published in September 2024. She enjoys injecting a touch of domestic noir into her work, and blending present day with myths, biblical references, fairy tales, fables and history. She is also a playwright and the ghostwriter of a series of bestselling memoirs published by Mirror Books, Thrown Away Children. 

Vanessa Horn

Ruth

audio read by Howard Timms

As she waits inside her cell, the music binds her mind;
macabre music, complex, though she feels it should define
these coiled feelings locked inside her, maybe to explain
why she acted as she did instead of opting to abstain.

Her inner clock keeps perfect time as cadences increase,
relentlessly reminding her she’ll never be at peace.
Added to this discord twist the clamours from outside –
harsh jeers of humanity to sneer, cheer and deride.         

The footsteps she’s been dreading intertwine her eerie song,
thudding in portentous mode – their bass note dark and strong.
Crescendoing to thunderous heights, the music’s at full force,
accentuating why she’s here, declining to endorse.   

She waits, quite calm, her stillness contradicting inner fears;
motionless and silent, showing not a sign of tears.
Perhaps, although she knows the grim proceedings are in place,
she’s tethered to the hope that she will still be granted grace.

She feels that she was triggered, even though she held the gun,
by all that was imposed on her, from all that he had done.
Betrayed by this contriving man, she overstepped the line,
but now without the carnal proof, his name she can’t malign.

She realises there’s no reprieve, no grounds to liberate;
the footsteps stop, the key unties the ending to her wait.
A prison guard comes into view – the clock begins to chime –
and looks at her with shrewd eyes as he tells her, “Ruth – it’s time.”

Vanessa Horn has been writing stories and flash fiction since 2013, venturing into poetry just over a year ago. She enjoys experimenting with different forms, often running a musical theme through her poems, and has been placed several times in Writing Magazine’s ‘In the Spotlight’. ‘Ruth’ focuses on the final morning experienced by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK.

Sandra Galton

The Road to Nowhere

I have a sense of having always known
this road – I have not seen its beginning

or its end, but often I’ve gone walking there –
leaning into a long evening’s dust

from drying crops and hollyhocks
before stopping on the old Stone Bridge

to watch a barn owl lift, as if tossed
through the haze by some unseen hand.

Long ago this was a road to nowhere –
sea spilled over land, a wide river

separated one village from the next – ships
dropped anchor here at Wiveton, but

now, only each church survives,
rock solid galleons still riding the swell

of an altered coast, honouring the drowned –
today there are meadows,
 
a shallow stream where swans drift, nodding
in deference to the past 

and I am just passing through, glad
to have known this road in part, knowing

it went before me,
wondering if it’ll go on without.

Sandra Galton is a London-based musician. She holds an MA in Writing Poetry (Poetry School, London/ Newcastle University), and her poems have appeared in a variety of publications. She has read at Poetry in Aldeburgh and, in 2020, her pamphlet Shadow Selves (Green Bottle Press) received a special mention in the TLS by William Wootten, one of the Michael Marks Awards’ judges.

Paul McDonald

Lachrymiform
(for EW)

Sticklebacks were flecks of starlight
eating air, we’d sieve to watch them flare
their gills, wonder at their upside-down life.
I’d place them in your palm so you could

feel their weight of nothing, let them
be electric on shocked skin. Tadpoles were
different: globular in shallows, they didn’t
seem to know their way home. You wouldn’t

hold one even with your eyes shut, shrank
from bulbous rubber heads, ribbon tails.
Too dark, perhaps, like midnight come to life;
too much like the fear at the centre of

your eyes. Some of us could see it even
then, widening with shadows as you lost your
own way. I can’t bear them either now, search for
words to capture them: their shape of sadness.

Paul McDonald taught American literature at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of twenty books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Press, 2023).

Margaret Morey

Ripe for Development

It was a smart hotel back in the sixties,
when early package tours brought people
for a week of sun and sea. They pulled a face
at red wine sour as vinegar, nursed their sunburn,
took home straw donkeys and sombreros.

Now it moulders behind rusted iron railings –
across the road the sea, the wide sweep of beach
and the jagged shards of the Medes Isles.
A perfect ruin, it keeps the town at arm’s length,
turns in on its own slow collapse to savour its solitude.  

Pale asphodels and wild giant orchids
struggle through the rubble of ruined rooms,             
between drinks cans and polystyrene trays
tossed in by passers-by. Feral cats skulk blackly,
patrolling corridors they’ve flattened through the brambles.

In the quiet of the early morning, streaks of pink dawn fade
and the milky sea drinks in the deep blue summer sky.
Beach bars put out sunshades for the new unfolding day.
But here, inside the fence, decay progresses
unnoticed, at its own steady, secret pace.

Today is the last day: tomorrow an iron monster
will clank its way through the rusted metal gate.
It will bend its meccano neck to take its first
ruthless bite of this perfect putrefaction,
sparing nothing, making new.

Margaret Morey enjoys travel, which is the inspiration for some of her writing, including this poem, set in L’Estartit on the Costa Brava. Margaret often visits her friends who live there, and this decaying hotel has become part of her mental landscape. She is a retired careers adviser and lives in Northumberland with a very chatty Bengal cat, Mimi.

Gabriella Stephenson

Third place: ‘Caddis larva’ by Gabriella Stephenson
‘Caddis larva’ is full to the brim with gorgeous language that reflects – and quietly inspires – a deep attention to natural world with gems such as ’the earth shifts in pen cap fragments’ and ’This tessellating case of Here’. 

Caddis Larva

Stay here with me — in the shallower, slower part of the river —
Where the clear, cool water is too pure to be real
And I’m lured to the rocks like a moth to a flame —
Some power strikes me to my knees —
To sink with no reflection —
Mountains crumble into pebbles;
Glaciers melt into liquor,

Patience! The earth shifts in pen cap fragments.
Some cosmic force, not the current,
Not my current body.

I cannot understand yet — I wait
With bated breath,
With the palm of the sun on my back —

Thank you for your patience:
For being here.

The rocks have legs.
They are crawling. 
I don’t know anything and By Jove I am lucky!
I don’t know if you bite —
You might but I don’t care.

I offer you my open hand.
I promise to be gentle.

How long did it take to design your armour?
This tessellating case of Here —
These particles of rock and bark and time and space;
This place — abstracted on your back.

Is it camouflage or decoration? 
Or is it like the aster in my hair?

Stay here with me — in the shallower, slower part of the river —
In our temporary armour.

See the eagle — See how it does not cast a shadow —
How we don’t either.
I offer you my open hand.
I promise to be gentle.

Gabriella Stephenson has won third prize with her first competition entry.

Louise G Cole

A grain of rice begins to talk sense

I met a single grain of rice in the top meadow
as I walked a summer line through cow parsley,
pollen-heavy buttercups, dandelions, long grass.

But I wondered where the rest of its kind were,
so I stopped to ask if it was lonely there,
uncooked without salt or water? I couldn’t tell
 
in the bright light if this was white rice or brown,
local, or from some distant delegation destined
to end up as risotto or in a sweet milk pudding.

I settled down among clover and ox-eye daisies,
began to ask questions, felt the need to know
what a single grain of rice could tell me about why,

where and how. The rice took a while to respond,
but I was patient, there was nowhere else to be.
And how does that make you feel? I asked at last,

hearing again, alone doesn’t have to mean lonely,
how the journey here had been a big adventure,
but now it wanted solitude, happy to be single.

I was impressed by the rhetoric of a grain of rice,
then it said: Now run along home and leave me be.
So I did.

Louise G Cole writes poetry and short fiction and is a 2018 Hennessy Literary Award winner who (temporarily) had a Dublin pub re-named in her honour. 

Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy for her 2019 Laureate’s Choice series, Louise has since been published in Ireland and the UK. The ‘G’ in her name avoids unnecessary confusion with an underwear model. www.louisegcolewriter.com.

Judith van Dijkhuizen

Don’t Take Me to Oxfam

I am the story
he read out loud
with you on his lap.

I am the squashy sofa,
the warmth of your father’s arms,
the smell of tobacco;

I am those voices:
the blue fairy, the fox,
the sorrow of Pinocchio’s father.

I am the winter
when you huddled by the coal-stove;
the angel-candles, the tree.

I am that spring Sunday
when he gave you pancakes with lemon and sugar,
and read me afterwards.

I am the summer
when you thought yourself grown up
and put me away.

I am the autumn
when your father died
and you took me out once more.

Judith van Dijkhuizen has been published in anthologies and in magazines.  She has read at Cheltenham Literature Festival after winning the GWN competition, and some of her poems have been broadcast on local radio.

John Newton

Bad news

It can come from anywhere, but always falling.
The familiar number at this odd hour.
The pauses that tell you what the flat words cannot. Clicking like a lock.
You freeze in the hopes it might mistake you and pass by.
The air breaks. Like biting a tine, everything stops.
But the news sways back and forth like a noxious censer.
Sprinkled on your tongue like paracetamol dust. Silent bombs dissolving.
The distance you thought you saw painted on the backdrop flutters, hoovered up into a new
vanishing point.
Your skinned hopes detach, rising huge and improbable like a hot air balloon, leaving you the
crackle-mouthed basket, gawping in askance.
Slowly, a migraine gravity settles on your cranium, seeping like frozen yolk.
Sense now speaks a new language.
Demagnetising hammer blows ring sharp in your ears, shape your tongue.
Every question is loss. Every answer, disbelief.
These are your accent now.
Your face, lined with it like a newly-fractured pane.
Life bruised but not broken.
And the world walks on, hands behind its back, parading, as if it didn’t know.
And what are you left but to follow?

John Newton is from Erdington in north Birmingham. His work has appeared in Inky Needles, Popshot Quarterly and aswirl. He lives in Essex with his wife and daughters.

Joan Baxter

Ablaze

Odd, the way the tree went up like that,
on a day so humid that I clung to my clothes
like a slug on a doomed leaf.
One moment eased into another
until the afternoon spread
like soft cheese on old bread.

The displacement of air was so unfamiliar
I couldn’t place it. ‘Whump’ it said
with a rush like a great bird’s leap,
wing beats gathered up, flung down
then my own chain reaction
from chair to window, hand on pane.
In the frame a new view.

The biochemistry of tree is not a mystery.
We know it breathes, pores barely seen 
on the underside of leaves and it bleeds,
from the name you carved, here xylem,
there phloem. Watch how light plays
through canopies greedy for the spectrum,
save the greens, a shade for every species,
this one Poplar.

How it burned. Somebody witnessed
the beginning, held the key
to ignition, whatever was done
that cannot be undone. All I knew
was the shame of it, the colours of rage
as the atoms that could leave it left it,
cracks like gunfire the breaking of strength
then the long, dark fuming.
This negative space.

Joan Baxter reads and writes poetry because it combines emotion and reason so perfectly, ideas as thought and feeling carried by a word puzzle. Competitions provide a way for me to develop. I seem to write a lot about transition, perhaps because I live close to the sea, hear it roiling at the edge of everything else.

Jodie Duffy

Second place: ‘Wreck’ by Jodie Duffy
‘Wreck’ is a poem that bears reading and re-reading: it is a wonderfully constructed piece. The first and last lines balance and perfectly bookend an imaginative metaphor – one written so vividly as to be made imaginable. 

Wreck

I fall asleep beneath the merlot
ocean, warmed by alcoholic currents

deep in the tannins, settled in
the sands of the shifting sheets

the octopus slinks into my head
through a bubbling nostril, climbs

into the crevice behind my left eye
entwines its tentacles, squeezes

the rectus muscles into a twitch
chromatophores drift

a skittish fish swims in
tight circles around the glass

on the bedside tablev
mindful of the octopus

slumped in my temple, I too
crave the intimate dark

Jodie Duffy lives in Gloucestershire and works in education. Her poems have appeared in a number of publications, including Mum Poem Press and Black Cat Poetry Press anthologies.

Jason Lytollis

Something and Nothing

First, we saw a hairline crack
open around him
but it wasn’t enough for anyone to mention.
Then he started to lag behind his outline.
He rattled when he took to using a stick,
and when it became a walking frame
he clunked against the sides of his old size.
He started wearing a scarf indoors and put on
an extra layer to pack the gap.
He was feeling the draught.
By then the gap was winning. It squeezed him
into his eyes and eyebrows, shrank his days down into visits.
It creased his lips, forced the pinkness from his face
and slowly, slowly punctured him, letting all the air escape.

Jason Lytollis is a poet who lives in Cumbria. He recently completed a PhD on Newcastle University’s English and Creative Writing programme and his poems have been published in magazines and anthologies.

Jan Edwards

Spring evening, Suffolk

Slipping through a gap in a hawthorn hedge
into a quiet evening lane, tipped by cow parsley,
you catch, behind the chipping of the chiff chaff,
yes, a distant cuckoo.

And at first you can’t quite place the feeling –
the heart’s nod
of recognition,  the hailing
of a hazy childhood landscape :
footpaths frothed by nettles,
glow of buttercups, birdsong reaching end to end.

But those years ago, there was
no sifting of  sadness, just wonder at a never-
ending light, a day stretched to its limits
waiting to twang back into place again tomorrow.

And now, some decades later , what’s known cannot be
unknown; this reunion’s fleeting, fast
on its way to never coming round again.

A buzzard’s cry laments.
The shadows lengthen.
Your footsteps mark the time
along the high-hedged lane.

Jan Edwards, based in Bristol, is a regular contributor to the thriving local poetry scene, both in ‘open mic’ contexts and in various music and poetry collaborations. Her poetry explores, celebrates and mourns the people, creatures and landscapes that shape our lives. Originally from rural Herefordshire, Jan has roots in South Wales.

David Dawson

Daze of Remembrance

You try so hard to remember, sat alone in the holy chair.
But pictures juggle about like Shiva’s many arms in the air
holding snakes and bells and flowers all askance
and you don’t know which one to hold up to the light.
You are about as close to seeing a picture that feels alright
as the bronze effigy is to actually starting to dance.

The only dance left, of course, is you
and your stumbling story, multi-storeyed
shimmering in the slow daze of remembrance.

You try so hard to remember, sat alone in the garden nearby.
But it is tricky trying to pin each dead butterfly
on the ever-shifting wall of perpetual absence.
Twirling round rosebay willow-herb are some live butterflies their smudged rainbows dance in your half-closed eyes
as some half-forgotten memories revitalize in the trance.

The only colour left, of course, is you
and your stumbling story, multi-storeyed
in the low haze of the slow daze of remembrance

And so you try to remember, sat alone by the sea.
But even though you cast your fishing-line-memory
far out to sink down deep, at casual first glance
the creatures you haul up seem deaf and blind.
For the surfing sunlight they are ill-designed
leaving you all alone in an impenetrable silence.

The only sound left, of course, is you
and your stumbling story, multi-storeyed
in a maze through the haze of the daze of remembrance.

David Dawson writes poems instead of smoking marijhuana. A limerick a week prevents Covid. Have 6 booklets of poems on death (the last laugh, the final recycle, the black hole, from it to ex-it, the itch you can’t scratch and the end of the story) known only to suspicious magpies, indifferent jays and appreciative crows in the French Pyrénées.

Cecilia Rose

Your Absence

Your absence
changes everything in me.

I don’t have to rush home to you,
don’t have to think about a meal,
or how you feel.
I know you are elsewhere,
and will return with a cargo of things to share.

But who will I be
by the time you get back? This lack
of ease without you. I am
a wild unpredictable undisciplined thing,
like a boat adrift  this gift  this  freedom
to do as I please,
still in my dressing gown at midday.
What would you say?
The few necessary tasks I know need done
are sitting there like Buddhas.

But I,
fly,
flick on the radio for that play, leap into town and spend the day
with friends. Catch the last bus home  and head for bed,
nothing to be said, because you are not here
to anchor me deep, and safe, and predictable,
in the strong,  powerful, harbour that is us.

Without the weight of you holding me always,
I froth and bubble, bob on a bewildering tide,
or take wing, like a gull over the foam,
soar skywards, and finally fly back
to the empty ship of home,
as though it were all mine, and mine alone.

So what will I become when you
finally cut loose and are never coming back?

Will I dissolve into spume, or bird,
or mermaid, or none of these?
Whatever – I will be utterly changed and lost
for a while,  in uncharted seas.

Cecilia Rose lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh  in Scotland.  She has loved, read, and  written poetry since she was a child. She has had  some short stories published, and plays performed, but she has only recently begun to send poems out into the world. 

Carol Caffrey 

Abundance

What will you have as you sit back in your chair,
settling like coals on the fire, listening to the soughing
of the wind, the ebbing of the tide?

Will you have the chaffinch, sniffing for crumbs
on the table while the sheep natter in the distance?
The sea a Dufy blue, dolphins arcing through

the water and the Bull, the Cow and the Calf
marching forever towards the Skelligs?
Would it be enough to have the white horses

heaving themselves onto the rocks, swathes
of montbretia winding you home, the lilt
of music mingling with summer voices on the air?

What will you have after all of that, as evening
closes in and the horizon narrows like your life?
Oh, says you, I’ll have too much.

Carol Caffrey is an Irish writer living in England. Her poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Poets’ Republic and The Mechanic’s Institute Review. She has been featured in a number of competitions, including the Fish Anthology, Verve Festival and the Chrysse Morrison Prize.  Her debut chapbook, The Untethered Space, is published by 4Word Press.

Barbara Hickson

Bank Job

I’ve known this path in all weathers,
in all seasons — or rather,
not this path.
The path I knew as a child,
a stony track with an iron chain,
was swept away long ago.
As were its replacements,
each conceding another few yards,
each eventually succumbing
to the water’s onslaught,
its meticulous excavation
of tree roots and boulders.
Today, a six-inch slab of concrete
paves the way, edged with willow
and coir mat, though here on the curve,
where the surge and heave hit hardest,
a gabion wall takes up the challenge.
At the far end, where the land dips,
what’s left of the previous path
is just visible under two feet of water.
I watch as the river laps at mud and rubble,
eases its way under the concrete. 
For now, it’s toying with the small change
of pebbles and celandines, but soon
it’ll be the concrete, the stone wall,
the beech tree, the cast-iron gate.
The river will take it all.

Barbara Hickson’s poems have appeared in anthologies and journals including Poetry Salzburg Review, London Grip, Channel, Echtrai and Finished Creatures amongst many others.  They have also been successful in several competitions including Magma Editors’ Choice and The Plough Prize. 
Her poetry pamphlets are A Kind of Silence (Maytree Press, 2021 ) and Only the Shining Hours (Maytree Press, 2024).

Kerry Darbishire

First place, audio: ‘Beneath a paper sky‘ by Kerry Derbyshire
This moving narrative poem brilliantly shows an oncology waiting room and its occupants’ fear and vulnerability. It just missed the text long list because of some obscure references. But the audio’s momentum and vocal expertise turned those references into added strength.

Beneath a paper sky

the dream of flakes falling,
northern air carrying scents of pine and husks,
     we begin to travel towards winter.

In The Narnia Suite – I see chill and confusion, patients
weaving through blasts of air con’, with sticks, in wheelchairs
like salmon returning upstream to spawning waters.
     Names are called, but not ours.

We’d like to cancel, but we’re almost there
and must follow the smooth-as-ice path –
     no tree roots to trip us up, miss our connection.

The Pharmacy will have all we need to live or die, though dying is not our choice, besides it’s lunch time
and hunger rises like the white hill we’ll eventually slide
     down. Please let staff know you are back from Xray.

A low mutter of voices spills from the café and floats
in the dustless air. The smell of coffee so strong we could drown
in this room. We wait. Time is an eclipse. Seasons out of kilter.
How are we doing? Very well, except this is not
the destination we planned. We eat bars of Rocky Road as if
     they’re the last sweet promise in the world.

We’re summoned to a long thin corridor, lingering smell
of wet wipes or is it plasters? Two men lean against the magnolia wall
reminiscing a succession of TV sitcoms: Ronnie Barker, Del Boy,
the chandelier, Dad’s Army… Don’t tell them your name Pike. For a moment
we’re dosed in sunshine. Late arrivals wander back and forth dressed
n X-ray gowns, passing hand sanitizers, red lights, green lights,
a watercolour of the Pigeon Tower – Rivington, and screens, monitors,
     zigzag tape peeling off the floor, leading us to a diagnosis.

Where once summer cemented my husband’s bones, a storm
threatens. It’s his turn to wear the gown, a challenging manoeuvre
in the smallest room. He sets off alone, just like my father                                     
     disappearing into a blizzard.

Kerry Darbishire lives in the English Lake District. She writes most days inspired by her wild surroundings. In 2023 she was poet in residence at Rydal Mount, the home of William Wordsworth. Her poems have won and been placed in many competitions and appear widely in anthologies and magazines. She has three pamphlets and three poetry collections, her most recent is River Talk, published by Hedgehog Press.

Twitter contact: @kerrydarbishire

Lucy Crispin

Cross-section

Here in the valley, golden light
slips down birch trunks
as it slides from the dimming sky.
The garden has fallen silent.
Birds are finished with the day.
Only starlings still whirr across the gloaming,
summoned to the reedbeds’ gleam.

Elsewhere, a woman
is carrying a stranger’s child,
picking her way through the rubble.
Lights go out in theatre again;
stock-cupboards gape; air is heavy
with lament. At the border, mortar-smoke
is a pom-pom of white in the so-blue heavens.

Elsewhere, an elephant
lifts her nail-rimmed foot
over the tumbled bones.
Shorn earth is shadeless, fissured; can mother no seed.
Sky is high and hard,
or roiling with black and orange.
The green sanctuaries are burning, burning.

Elsewhere, waves
upend a small boat, tip huddled figures
into a cold-steel sea. Under the wind
sky empties endlessly; the great rowan has fallen.
From a top window a man and a boy
watch the rising waters.
On impromptu lakes the wrong birds have gathered.

Elsewhere, in grownups’ clothes
fear prates and postures at the mic,
preaches the gospels of hatred and acquisition.
Striplights hum day and night in the warehouse
where Colleagues are scurrying.
A child scrolls, takes a selfie, loathes herself;
and a teenager packs his schoolbag, does final checks on the gun.

First place, text: ‘A box of frightened’ by Lucy Crispin
‘A box of frightened’ is a beautifully simple, stark, quotidian representation of care at its most intimate: the small things placed tenderly within reach of one whose reach is increasingly limited. 

A box of frightened

Changing your bed again, I’m careful to put back,
there to the left where your hand falls easily,
the battered tissue box you keep near you
with stuff you might need: two opened pocket-packs,
the hearing-aid case, lipsalve, a flattened carton
of painkillers and a small hand-held electric fan

which—I find later, when I go to turn on
the blanket—I must have knocked, for it’s
thrumming away in the silence, its blades trapped
and tapping at the box’s sides (must have been on
for hours), fast at first I guess but now,
when I find it, feebler and beginning to falter.

Lucy Crispin is a winner of the Segora Poetry Prize and two-time winner of the Ware Sonnet prize. Her pamphlets wish you were here and shades of blue were published by Hedgehog Press (2020). She’s active performing her poetry and facilitating groups and workshops, and is currently working on her next, full-length book, hungers. Find out more at: lucycrispin.com

Rules for The Beginning . . . of the End competition 2024

Closed 30 September 2024 at 11.59 BST

• The contest is open to all poets, except those who act as volunteers for Wildfire Words/Frosted Fire or major prizewinners in the last two years of Frosted Fire/Wildfire Words competitions.
• All poems must be entirely the entrant’s own, unpublished work.
• International entrants are welcome, but entries must be in English. Translations are not allowed, unless the poet has translated their own poetry into English.
• You may submit as many poems as you like, in batches of up to 4 poems. Each poem should be a separate file, and an entry fee must be paid for each.
• Each poem’s title should be at the top of the page, and the file name of the poem must be the poem’s title.
• Each poem should be a separate file in Word or PDF, and no longer than 50 lines, including title and stanza break lines.
• Do not put any identification on the work. We will match your entry title to your email address after the anonymous judging is complete.
• To maintain anonymous judging, your entry must not contain a poem that might be recognized by any of the judges through workshops, mentoring, or public readings.
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but an entry must be withdrawn in the event of it winning a prize or publication elsewhere. Entry fees are not refundable once an entry has been received.
• Work will not be returned, so please keep a copy.
• We are unable to give feedback on individual entries or on the results of the competition — the judges’ decisions are final.
• Results will be emailed by late October to all who entered, and published on this website and social media.
• The entry fee is £4 per poem or £12 for 4 — but on 10 September will rise to £5 per poem or £16 for 4.
• Entries must be paid for on the entry form, and your entry file uploaded, by the closing time of 11.59 pm on 30 September 2024. Our banking for credit or debit card payments is provided by PayPal, but you do not need a PayPal account to pay by card.