Poets win prizes for verses about threat to nature

THE green poetry competition prizegiving and poetry reading took place at Henley library on the evening of June 13, writes Sue Turner.

The event, part of Great Big Green Week, was well attended and the participants enjoyed sharing their work and getting to know each other.

The library was a great venue and the librarians were very hospitable. There was a great sense of community and life getting back to how it used to be.

Sue Turner and David Williams had the idea of asking people to write about what they loved in nature or what they would miss if it disappeared because of climate change.

They had been in a poetry workshop together when Sue owned Henley Books.

The response was really good and there were some marvellous entries.

There were two first prize winners of the adult section — Laura Healy with The Soupy Sea and David Grubb with Seasons of Light.

Laura is a lecturer in creative writing and runs a writing workshop at the library. The judges were not aware of that when they read the poems. David was known to be a published and highly regarded poet.

He will be remembered by some as headmaster of Gillotts School for a short term but he was mainly involved in church-related charities helping children in need in war-torn areas.

They each won a £25 book token.

The runners-up were Constance Butt and Gill Learner who received a £15 book token each.

There were six highly commended poems.

The winner of the under-12s category was Phoebe Friend with her poem A Bee in a Tree.

The teenage section was won by Katie Priestley with I Sing to You Each Morning.

Both were awarded a £25 book token.

The prizes and the room hire were sponsored by Southern Plant in Henley whose generosity was much appreciated.

Zoë Ferreira, of the Henley Larder, contributed beautiful chocolate ladybirds for the highly commended entries.

Here are the winning adult poems:

Seasons of Light

Light folds between apple boughs;
in winter you can sense its crisp decays.
Between storm and snow it gathers deep,
waiting for April and a new song.

In summer it enchants thousands of trees;
in night orchards the bark is still warm.
Core's convulsion shapes each fruit as if
this time could never come again.

In early autumn apple pickers visit with baskets
and ladders. Gently they lay the fruits in the boxes.
In silence the reek of former seasons settles them;
odours of twine, old paint jars, dead nests.

My grandfather told us once that apples were
only ready when they came away with a simple twist.
As a boy I was sent high into the branches seeking
out those we could not reach or shake away.

At Christmas the red ones were polished and placed in ornate cut-glass bowls.
At the table white flesh yielded to ivory handled knives; deep, deep
the memory and seasoning of
summer days.

David Grubb

The Soupy Sea

The clear plastic skin of a bag is not easily seen.
Determined it clings, a synthetic spider web, inviting prey in.

The fish panic swimming faster through the looping elastic of facemasks.
Circus performers, they twist and turn, swinging like trapeze artists,

but caught, they dangle, tails entwined, stretching in unavoidable decline.

Perhaps they dream of coral reefs, once beautiful and bright.
Now coral cracks like chalk, while little orange fish,

deflated clowns, are lost in a world of grey and decay.

The sea gets murkier; consommé turning to soup.

A junk yard of rusting trolleys, tangled laces, tyres, bags, everlasting plastic.
Micro particles, like plankton, blocks their insides, helpless they are carried on the tide.

Bodies of sea life wash up on the sand, as a turtle wrestles in a plastic noose.
Oil and sewage, trash and waste, a thick suffocating chowder.

Laura Healy