Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Third Prize Winner - Elaine Gaston

Elaine Gaston is from the North Coast of Ireland. She was educated at Oxford University and lived in different countries before returning to Belfast where she lives and works. She has had work published in anthologies by Blackstaff Press and Peterloo and in poetry journals including Poetry Ireland Review, North, Rialto, The Stinging Fly, The Shop, Verse and The Honest Ulsterman. Her work is featured in BBC Northern Ireland’s ‘Study Ireland: Poetry’ series and she recently read at The British Council in St Petersburg and at the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in Dublin. She received an award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2007 to work on her first collection for which she is seeking a publisher. She is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. Elaine is also a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

 
Offering 

For months after the funeral they came
from all over and if we were not about
each left a simple offering at the house,
a bag of spuds set in the porch, no name,
a pheasant, plucked, from the road up the back,
a couple of mackerel, poteen, whiskey,
Madonna and child in a holy picture,
on the window sill, a tin with a big farm brack,
a whole cheese from away down the glen,
a pot of stew still warm on the doorstep.
Between these gifts there was no difference,
left foot or right we were all one in this,
ploughing our minds for hope in the face of death
we hurled prayers into the same sky, same earth.