Carole Bromley

This poem won first prize in the Connections competition.

IN THE RED LION

Slatted light
falling
on your hand

has me longing
for the gloom
of hen-huts

the closed-in shitty
egg-shedding
contentment

the emptiness
afterwards
the warm filth

all that tapping
and stirring
as the cock

headed rooster
fixes me
with his jewel eye.

This poem won second prize in the New Forest Poetry Competition.

AWAY


Back home my father is having a brain scan.
He's afraid they'llfind something
and lock him up. I am admiring a view
in Umbria, looking out over tiles
shaped like hotel curls of butter.

I have left that other me behind. They say
it could arrive any day. Domani perhaps,
or dopodomani. The airline has a new scam
to cut costs. It leaves your luggage at Stansted.
Surely it should be enough to deposit you
beside a pool with what you stand up in,
a passport, a few hundred euro,
a breeze in the olive grove, a lizard on a wall?

After twelve hours you can buy essentials.
By then you'll have made a mental list
of all the things you can�t live without:
sunscreen, fresh underwear, a towel, a hat.
So little to hang on to what you know.
You can do without the pedal-pushers,
the books, that necklace from Australia.

The sky is every different shade of blue,
white almost, where it meets the mountains
I can't photograph. I have no palette
to mix the greens of cedar, bay and almond,
no fine tip to trace a criss-cross orchard,
that avenue of cypress leading to a farm.

They will be sliding my father out now
from a machine like a mortuary drawer.
They will unhinge his visor, let him go,
then start to examine the tell-tale gaps
where memories were; the pier at Saltburn,
the cliff-lift, the way we pressed our noses
on the glass to watch the sea slowly rise
to meet us, slate-grey edged with white.

This poem won third prize in the Ware Poets Poetry Competition.

NOTTINGHAM REVISITED


Everything here is alien; the signs,
that green bus, the market-square littered
with pigeons fed by a stranger
who doesn't know I once sat
on that same bench
eating my sandwich in the sun,
watching the shoppers dart in and out
of the shadows beneath the clock.

Griffin and Spaldings has gone now,
its familiar Victorian frontage
replaced by concrete, a revolving door,
a brash sign saying Debenhams.
In 1966 when I was seventeen
I fancied the window-dresser
who all day long undressed women
who were taller and thinner than me.

I wanted to change places
with the naked dummy under his arm.
He'd have been surprised
how pliable I could be,
how unresisting. I'd have smiled
and smiled at the woman
throwing bird-seed, let him
arrange my limbs and turn my head.

The success story just goes on... the poem below won a prize in the BT Stay in Touch section of the National Poetry Competition.

STAY IN TOUCH

I never knew there were tiny sensors
on every millimetre of my skin
that could feel the texture,
the youness of you. The feeling
was quite new. A gentle push,
tap or caress. Only a small amount
but it had a noticeable effect.
Any slight stroke or mark will do.
The scret's in the detail, the slight attack
of a disease. You had this ability
to make contact but were just testing,
out of play, scoring a hit. Touche.
Panning for gold, fingering
a keyboard. Devious, you stole away
leaving me text messaging RUOK,
checking my inbox twenty times a day.
I ring 1471. It's sad but true.
Needless to say they've never heard of you.

Carole also won first prize (£100) in the First Lines competition, judged by Michael Laskey, with the poem below.

WAITING ROOM

I read my stars. They promise me
a financial bonanza, a new romance.
Uranus is aligned with Mars
and anything could happen. But the date
is December 1998 and the coupons torn out,
the perfume strip opened, the cranberry season
past. I shift uncomfortably
in my clean underwear and read
the display written in lower case
by some receptionist with a secret wish
to be a primary school teacher.
An elderly gentleman turns a cartwheel,
a lady in twinset and pearls cuts a hedge,
twenty minutes of moderate exercise 3 times a week
is apparently all you need. It doesn't say
how to fill the rest of the day.
The intercom crackles and a voice
like a station announcer summons
Albert Jones to room 13. No-one moves.
Perhaps Albert Jones is deaf
or has tired of waiting on plastic chairs
and gone off for twenty minutes moderate exercise.

And Carole also won the Yorkshire Prize of £50 in the Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition, judged by Mimi Khalvati, with the poem below.

THE HOMECOMING OF SIR THOMAS WYATT

When Sir Thomas returned from Italy bearing
the sonnet his wife gave him a cold welcome.
She�d had a pinnyful of roundelays and epics,
of his naked foot stalking in her chamber
at all hours declaiming Sir Patrick bloody Spens
and now this. She'd been hoping for chianti,
one of those models of the leaning tower
or at least a decent bunch of grapes.
And he'd been so irritatingly cock-a-hoop.
Men are like that. Have to plant their little flags.
She didn't let on though, just thought
"Oh well at least it's short", folded her arms
and gave him a look like Jack's mum
when he brought back that fistful of beans.

SALVIA
Sage has been shown to improve memory

You measured a length of garden twine,
secured it either end with pegs,
dressed the red flowers in ranks
guarded by white alyssum, blue lobelia
in your first suburban flower-bed.

I wonder what you'd have said
if you'd been here to read the article.
Would you have grasped at straws,
tried anything to halt the spread of the disease
that was slowly destroying your mind?

Or would you have scoffed quacks, gone on polishing your old chemists'jars
with their Latin labels? You warned me
not to sample the noxious potions
I pounded in spare flower-pots.

Green-fingered like you, I revived
the one plant that failed to thrive,
nursed it in the plot I'd cleared
on the right of the summer-house.
In a week it was back, filling the gap.

There was no salve, no balm, no herb
could quicken you. All I could do
was moisten your parched lips,
while, the other side of the one-way glass,
a gardener planted daffodils.


PLAYING WITH THE WIDOW DOLL

How I hate being buttoned up
into tight black bombazine,
this itchy crepe, mama's jet brooch.
Underneath her widow's weeds,
that angry face, the doll is me.

The baby-house is out of bounds,
the abacus, the counting blocks,
dissected maps and dolly cups.
The fiddler hasn'tt tapped his foot
since Harriet poured the sand away

Edward is the lucky one.
He doesn't have to stab his thumb
stitching ABC, just sits on a stool
tearing pages out of Exodus
to sail through the open window.

The only colour in this room
are the roses sealed in the immortelle.
I'd like to press my mouth to the glass
and breathe life into stiff buds
that have forgotten how to die.

Only the ark is allowed. Noah stands,
stiff as a priest on the wooden ramp.
I won't parade the camels and bears
into the hold of that dark house
with its endless view of the sea.

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