Young Poets
Published here are some of the excellent poems we receive from our gifted young writers.
You can submit poems either by post (please enclose a stamped address envelope for reply), via our on-line portal, or by email to acumeneditor@gmail.com. Please mark the contents ‘Young Poet Submission’, put this in the subject line if you are submitting by email, and put your name, age and address on each page of the submitted document below your poems. We would prefer a word file for the submission please.
Please submit no more than four poems. You should be aged between 16 and 25 years, the work should be unpublished.
Harry Ledgerwood
Lighthouse
Where has it gone?
That little lighthouse on the horizon
twirling like a boyhood barber pole
where inside the men chat wares and ends,
odds and past fair plays of the weekend
before their hair thins further and falls
to be swept under a Persian rug
bought with a tourist’s haggle. I squint
to see deeper into the distance, nothing.
My buoy rocks. A still sea. I tend
to its growing rot, its fiery rust, its little lies,
slow bobs, fungal calm.
Finally, I see the light
flicker like a rolling eight ball –
dark and white,
shine and black and back
into the gutter
to wait for the next penny drop.
Halfways
It was a body dying
on the road, they said
cycling past. Not just
a body – at first
it was an ambulance
and a crowd come to
glance and some bikes.
Then it was a paramedic
puffing pulses into a chest
lest she should be able
to snatch the body from
the vice claw of death.
And I curved my head,
my sickle neck flicking
round a crowded bend
but could only see half
a body, half up to the end.
There is a bullring in Spain
carved into the edge of
an Andalusian mountain
like a pore or volcano’s ash
pushing puss into the air.
I remember I saw a man
painting the spectator’s steps
white, he was shining under
the arch as I stood at the step
and waited by a shrine
at the old entrance
where the matadors would
pray before Mary and the bull.
I left before I could see
the wearing steps completely
white. Seeing the ambulance whir,
a blur over tarmac streets,
I imagined the bull
shining his nose ring
and praying.
Kerby
To learn a thing or two about the indecision of memory
I tore a piece of pink petal from my skin & chomped down
on its already curling, yellowing edges. It tasted like rubber or
tarmac trodden upon by a boy racer’s car or a little like leather
from a deflated football from when we were boys, the days
when we would stand on either sides of the road and raise
our arms high above our heads, World Cup 2012 footballs in
our palms, eyes bricked upon the thin strip of concrete
at the opposite set of trainers, taking it in turns to throw,
waiting for one of us to land, to have the leather returned
to us & we could finally go home under streetlight moons.
Zelda Cahill-Patten
Burial poem, for my ex
In the end you have a ship burial.
I lay out your body in a longboat’s prow
and fill the hull with everything you’ll need.
x
You are laid to rest on a bed of clean socks.
Ibuprofen, dental floss, dishwasher tablets:
all the things required in the next life.
x
Archaeologists will find your bicycle pump
and think it’s the hilt of a viking broadsword,
a dark lump misshapen by soil and time.
x
I lay down your speakers and your charity
shop CDs, your cigarettes and sunglasses.
I line up beer bottles like canopic jars.
x
Next I give you heirlooms. Your boat grave
is full of gravy boats, a great aunt’s hideous
porcelains, your baby shoes, your school notes.
x
I tuck grey hairs among the grave goods;
grant you old age, another girlfriend, a child, a cat.
I gift you hobbies: woodworking, cookery books.
x
As flames lap at the longship’s sides — waves of fire
slapping at the keel, heat running over your skin —
you are freed from one life, released to the next.
x
Walking Across the Atlantic
After Billy Collins
You’ve told me the story of your mum and dad:
how he walked from Cumbria to Scarborough,
to ask your mum to marry him. With plodding
devotion, he printed his love letter in mud. Yes,
she said. He’s yet to make the journey back.
I have no such story to tell our made-up child.
x
No. I didn’t cross the Atlantic. After you left,
I never slipped off my shoes and threw myself
from the end of the pier: bracing for cold,
then testing my weight on the buoyant swell.
It would have taken half a year at least,
those icy, faltering footsteps towards
x
America. Otherwise, I could have told our child
how the waves were soft against my soles.
How the crests copied shapes from home:
greyblue dales, whitecombed fells. Water
deep and desolate as peatland. I left no footprints.
Sea forgets, I’d say, where land remembers.
x
Bladderwrack
Day on day I’d harvest it
from the black rock,
never knowing it had
a name. I loved instead
its feeling on my skin —
wet and ridged and thick,
those fistfuls of sea-cysts, each
pustule glossy as an olive,
webbed like frogs’ toes into
one slick mass, which belched
when pinched. I pressed
the warts of salt-air
in my fingers and they
named themselves:
x
plerp brop plip slarp
***
some have also called it:
popweed bladderwrack
sea oak rock wrack
black tang sea grape
rockweed
and seawrack
and maybe others:
welt-bush bubble-shrub
boil-tang blister-leaf
plerp-weed brop-wrack
slarp-grape plip-oak
x
salt-names bursting
from between human lips
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