Cardiff International Poetry Competition

First Prize-winner - Rose Flint

Rose Flint is a poet, artist and art therapist. She teaches Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes at Bristol University and is Lead Writer for the Kingfisher Project, working in the community and hospital of Salisbury. She has three collections of poetry, Blue Horse of Morning (Seren), Firesigns (Poetry Salzburg) and Nekyia (Stride) a fourth, Mother of Pearl will be published this summer, by Avalon.
Previous awards include the Petra Kenny International Poetry Prize, a Year of the Artist Award and two Poetry Places. A long term ’Green’, she is a facilitator for ‘Be The Change’ and is involved in local sustainability projects. She lives in the country near Frome, Somerset – close enough to Longleat to hear the lions roar at night.

The Field

I want the field to be good for nothing
except itself.

I want the field to be random,
exploding with glittering spider gauze
or studded with swoops of starling
in their black sudden chatter and fizz, then gone.

I want the field to delight in its giving,
offering owlsong to night, honeysuckles sweetness
to summer shadows hock deep under oaks,
a stream’s rest and deliverance.

I want the field to care.
to shuffle itself around to make space
for a new calves, a million beetles, thousands
of buttercups, a hundred bees, slink foxes,
two May cuckoos.

I want the field to be green with
clover and plantain and orchid and selfheal -
not emerald with ryegrass and nitrogen.

I want the field not to have to prove anything
by statistics of weight.
I want the field to have its own quota
of roe deer, walkers, horses, flies and vetch.

I want the field to be able to borrow a free month
of bright dresses - chicory, moonflowers, poppies,
hedges of damson, cherry-snow, dog-roses.

I want the field to work honestly
striving each season to fullness
of hay or beets or corn, its hedges weaving
a winter-living of berries, thoughtfulness of hazels.

I want the field to have wild times
and grace notes, fallow dreams.
I want the field to be cherished, loved as family.
I want the field to be good for nothing
except itself.