Let us prey
WM’s Open Poetry Competition yielded a masterpiece of precision, says its judge, poet Alison Chisholm
WINNER: ALISON ALLEN Not a prayer
Reclining in shadow, this lime-green maiden perches on stalk-thin legs, her jaw all bony angles graceful hands raised in supplication. Don’t be fooled. Her queenly demeanour aims to deceive: she’s no fairy-tale princess - steal a kiss and she’ll still your beating heart.
In curling vines she bides her time, masking her sharp, alien face in the shifting foliage where fermenting grapes drip blood-red juice, their lingering scent a sultry siren call. The leaves tremble. Unblinking eyes rotate. One swift lunge and her bumbling victim’s hooked.
She draws him close, clasps him to her pale chest. Choking in honeyed air he feels truth stab as light falls through the parted leaves. Now she feasts, despatching him head first letting the gaudy wings that bore him dreamward spin down to join the others in the dust.
One of the great joys of adjudicating an open poetry competition is to revel in the range of subject matter covered by the entries. In the case of the Writing Magazine Open, the range was particularly wide-reaching, and covered the whole gamut of human emotion, every part of life from pre-birth to the afterlife, the natural world, the supernatural world, and a clever lament for a park bench. There was an equally appealing range of forms, with free verse, sestinas, sonnets and villanelles, and the less frequently seen terzanelle and trimeric, all demonstrating skills in crafting.