SCORCHING POEMS
Judge Alison Chisholm highlights the poems that sparked her interest
Alison Chisholm
FIRE POETRY WINNERS
1st prize Winner
Dartmoor Swaling by Pamela Trudie Hodge
November and the sun lengthens shadows, gilds bilberries, heather and Summer-sered bracken fronds.
Raddled sheep and skittering ponies have been herded to safety. Adders, forked tongues tasting danger,
Have slithered sinuously, slipping into moist, mossy sanctuaries. The air is empty of dawn birdsong.
Men gather, looking like gangsters, scarves tight over nose and mouth. Jan lifts a finger, tests the breeze.
Flails are set ready. A line of men hold long-handled fire-cans. A flame is struck. Cans smoulder
Burst into scarlet life, are lowered into tinder-dry scrub. Fire flares as sparks ripple along the straight line.
Dragon-breath roars, burning stems hiss and explode. Saplings are torches. Sparks fire-fly into the smoking air.
Rosebay Willowherb welcomes flames, burns like a beacon, catapults seeds to lie ash-dormant until Springtime.
Unlike the bush on Mount Horeb, gorse blazes, is consumed to ashes. Heather fireworks to a seething glow.
Flames are ruby-hearted opportunists leaping sideways to be flail-quenched. Sun rises on the ferment of Dante’s hell,
A livid backdrop on which the swalers in black silhouette seem to dance an ancient ritual to the God of Fire.
When readers were invited to think around the theme of fire to inspire poems for this competition, they responded with a broad range of approaches and styles. The Great Fire of London, commemorated 350 years after it devastated the capital, featured in a number of entries, but there were poems about bonfires and domestic hearths, firebrand characters and arson attacks, bush fires and rage… it would be difficult to think of an aspect of fire that was not covered.