Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Runner-up - Marianne Burton

Marianne Burton's pamphlet The Devil's Cut, (Smiths Knoll), was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She was awarded a year's mentorship by the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll, and has won various prizes including a runners-up prize in the Bridport competition, and first prize in the Mslexia poetry competition. She is widely published in the UK, the US, and South Africa, in magazines such as Agenda, Borderlands:Texas Poetry Review, New Contrast, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Rialto, Stand, and The North. Marianne is studying Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, and is a poetry mentor for the prison arts charity, the Koestler Trust.

 
Owls at Midnight

No carol singers swinging lanterns this year.
But singing nonetheless. Your father,
dropping ash, turns trom the television
to the sound, then reinstates to listen.

I lift you in Barbie pyjamas, dough -
warm still, and bring you wrapped to the window.
Two owls are calling: one squats on our chimney,
a cottage-loaf swivelling necklessly,

and each time the far one calls, the near one
elongates and whistles like a steam train.
Then, in the answering silence, he trembles
his whole body, waiting for the female

trom her wood post, before her wondering call
comes again, and he whoos with all
the bagpipe of his gut. Call, overlap,
overlap, call, lose sequence, take it back.

'Look,' I say 'look'. But you are tired,
your head is dropping against my head.
Owls have no power for you, any more
than Good King Wenceslas last year.

I take you back, chirping with misery.
'I told you she wouldn't care,' he says.