Ever since retirement I have been looking for these two poems. They were winners (if I remember it right) of the National Poetry Competition 2005. I had the Poetry Society magazine which published them, but somehow it didn't make it back to the UK with me.
Wonderful poems. Delighted to find them.
The Year the Rice-Crop Failed
by Melanie Drane
The year we married, rainy season
lasted
so long the rice crop failed.
People gave up
trying to stay dry; abandoned
umbrellas
littered the streets like dead
birds. One evening
that summer, a typhoon broke the
waters
of the Imperial moat and sent
orange carp flopping
through the streets around the
train station,
under the
feet of people trying to go home.
The stairs
to the temple became impassable;
fish slid
down them in a waterfall, heavy
and golden
as yolks. That night, I woke you
when the
walls of our home began to shake;
we held
our breath while the earth tossed,
counted
its pulse as though we could protect
what we’d
thought would cradle us –
then the
room went still and you moved away,
back into
sleep like a slow swimmer,
your eyes
and lips swollen tight with salt.
The next
morning, a mackerel sky hung over Tokyo.
The
newspaper confirmed the earthquake
started
inside the sea. I watched you dress to leave,
herringbone
suit, shirt white as winter, galoshes
that
turned your shoes into small, slippery otters.
After you
were gone, I heard hoarse and angry screams;
a flock of
crows landed on the neighbor’s roof,
dark
messengers of Heaven. Did they come to reassure,
to tell me
we’d be safe, that we would find
our places
no matter how absurd it seemed,
like the
fish sailing through the streets,
uncertain,
but moving swiftly?
Dog Otter
by Kevin Saving
He senses danger and is gone,
the water bulging in his wake.
You needn’t ever count upon
this sight again, and so should
take
the memory and then move on?
You’ll
never know what rendezvous he’ll break
with
liquid arabesques – nor how he’ll trawl
fresh
eddys, find new shoals to dredge.
His
underwater playgrounds call
within him
like a lover’s pledge.
He’ll wear
the river like a shawl
in slicked–back
freedom, near the water’s edge.
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