ESSEX POETRY FESTIVAL COMPETITION 2007

Highly commended
Denise Bennet, Havant, Hants

Wartime Fur Coat
Exhibit 141 Portsmouth Museum

In the war Mrs Violet Adcock
kept Chinchilla Rex rabbits for eating,
afterwards the skins were fashioned
into a fur coat.

The photo which shows her
wearing the coat at a post war wedding,
a sumptuous wrap styled
ftom sixty six grey rabbits,

reminds me

of when I was a child in the 50s
listening to my mother trilling
as she brushed the stairs;
I'll be loving you eternally
la la la la la la la la la

Sometimes I’d hide in her wardrobe
with her dead animals,
musquash, rabbit, fox,
amongst her warm, warm furs;
she loved her beaver lamb the best

Perhaps it was a gift from him
her sailor husband, lost at sea
the one she grieved for, sang about
as she swept the stairs,
did the dishes...

I wish I could hide again
in her wardrobe, drown out
her dry sobs, the Mantovani music
which haunts me still.
I'll be loving you eternally...
la la la la la la la la la

Highly commended
Roger Caldwell, Wivenhoe, Essex

The Mountains of Essex

For Rousseau no flat country could suffice,
            he required torrents, precipices, mountains:
only landscapes that provoked a sense of terror
            were sublime. Though men might argue
about mere formal beauty, as over Indian
             or Chinese tea, as for sublimity,
it's past all argument just as it's past all bounds
            - an angry sea at night, a lightning-storm
proclaims a universe too vast for us to call it home.
            He would have scorned flat Essex, its sIow­
flowing rivers, marshes, fields of silly sheep.
            But it is winter now, much snow has fallen,
I am listening to Sibelius on my stereo:
            flutterings of woodwind, sudden sweeps of strings
invoke the scene of snow and ice that I now see
            outside my window. Yet it too proclaims
winds howling through the forest, over mountain-tops
            - of which, of course, there are none in Essex.
But here too is something that's primeval:
            as snow is blown across the wintry wastes
there is some recourse against pettiness - the long
            perspectives and wide skies, a loss
of boundaries, the pathways all but disappeared. .
            With overcoat and Russian boots I now set off
out into another country, with wild winds of Essex
            screaming all about me, a small figure now,
mere dot in the eye, receding across occluded paths
            towards sublimity and the vanishing-point.