2021 POETRY COMPETITION WINNER

Prize: £1,000

Finalists:

“Australia” by Deryn Pittar

“Devil’s Punchbowl” by Sarah Wiesendanger

“Deutsches Wunderland” by Bean Sawyer

“Diary of a Dead Eel Boy” by Dean Gessie

“My Sister Lives in the Mountains” by Bruna Gushurst-Moore

“First Day Down the Pit” by Kay Reeves

“Heart Memories” by Sheila Croney

“Western Star” by Beatrice Hussain

and the winner is…

Bruna Gushurst-Moore

My sister lives in the mountains

My sister lives in the mountains, at the foot

of the Sangre de Cristos where the air runs clear 

and cold over boulders tumbled from the sides of giants, 

shouldered, under pine jerkins, with mossed decollage 

and armour of aspen, this golden and brazen

in the late autumn sun; their toes

playing clear down the breeze washed slope.

My sister lives in the mountains, where bounded

haunch of deer startle with the rush of the Crestone creeks,

running cold, and low, and clear with fish; trout, brown and rainbow,

silver-tailing upstream next the pad of the bear

over granite and sandstone marbled floor,

marking the bed, soft and heavy, like the sand silted

bottom he presses on his passing.

My sister lives in the mountains, across the dunes 

from the head of the great Rio Grand, this 

a traverse of country and bearer of seed 

pod, tree bark, bit of down from the back 

of a fledgling red-tailed hawk, flown over the valley 

on soft currents of air, rushing sage and mullein and minted leaves 

underfoot as you brush through the scrub, and the scent rises 

like a song into skies blue as pure cobalt, gloried 

like a vaulted expanse of hymn.

My sister lives in the mountains.

And this morning when I wake, with the cold

of October through the open at my window,

and the song of a crow in the pine next my house

like the cry of a cat-bird, raucous and rowdy, then

I think I might be. Back on a mountain next my sister, walking dust, 

with the clearness of air cold and clean like sheer slate,

walking the dust that is a peopled dust, 

held by the bones of the earth as we walk,

ground holding us by the souls of our feet.

And I forget, for one moment, this is Sussex, not Saguache, 

no water at the blue foot, just sheep in brambled fields.

The crow a long lost sister, several times removed; 

the pine Scots; not bristlecone or lodgepole, pinyon or ponderosa.

And in that moment, in that moment, in that moment

that lasts like time etched in flesh, the spread

of my grief is as long and as slow and as manied 

as the spread of a river, running from mountain to sea

over stone warmed with sun and brushed with crack willow. 

Then I rise and make coffee; I have many things to do.