Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Runner-up - Mario Petrucci

Poet, ecologist and physicist Mario Petrucci is widely renowned for combining innovation and versatility with a profoundly human aspect. He is the only poet to have been in residence at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. Mario is a Bridport winner, a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition, four times winner of the London Writers Competition, inaugural pamphlet selector for the PBS, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. His collection Flowers of Sulphur (Enitharmon, 2007) received an ACE Writers’ Award and a New London Writers Award, while his Arvon-winning Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon, 2004) was made into an internationally acclaimed film (Seventh Art Productions). Described as “Heartfelt, ambitious and alive” (Daily Telegraph), Heavy Water was placed among the top five poetry collections of 2004 by Poetry London.

in hay waist-deep was
 
uncle who said he saw
lash of rain snap
upward viper-
 
sharp to bite
the coming-down
tail – another tending
 
eaves at top of ladder
felt on his back
drops
 
worse than
wasps to a sack
while wife with foot
 
hard on bottom rung
kept her face of
tinder – yet
 
another
watched brown
slick of cloud a few
 
metres up suck back its
centre like a seam
in the roasted
 
bean – till it
split with blue &
for an hour all air smelt
 
of coffee – last it came to
me   i said   once
i stood
 
in rain so
ferocious streams
front & back – down
 
shallow contour of
nipples & ravine
between each
 
half of arse –
met at my pizzle
till i knew to my balls
 
how it felt to piss like
Orion: i said this
happened –
 
but they
laughed & took out
scythes & said the hay was
 
 
dry enough