Cardiff International Poetry Competition

 Runner-up - Naomi Foyle

Naomi Foyle is the author of The Night Pavilion, an autumn 2008 PBS Recommendation; Grace of the Gamblers, an illustrated ballad pamphlet about Irish pirate queen Granuaile; and The World Cup, all from Waterloo Press. She lives in Brighton and is currently completing a Creative Writing PhD at Bangor University on the topic of the warrior woman and narrative verse. Her poem 'Shaking the Bottle' arose out of research into female suicide bombers, research which also led Naomi to visit Egypt as a member of the Gaza Freedom March (which took place in Cairo after permission to travel to Gaza was denied). Upon her return she founded BWISP: British Writers In Support of Palestine, which can be joined on Facebook.

Shaking The Bottle

My eighteenth birthday, at a well-naff restaurant,
Mum gave me a 'good luck penny' :
a rind of copper jammed in an old Bolly cork.
'We drank the champagne for your christening, pet –
¬now this is to keep you afloat.'

It was the kind of tat you lose
before you even sling your coat on.
I was only half-joking when I said
she should have saved me the bottle instead.

*

That day in Jerusalem, a girl my age
exploded at a bus stop. The bomb she had on
killed two Israeli solders, wounded sixteen people,
and blasted her body to steam. Her head,
still wrapped in its scarf, shot off in an arc down the street.

The pix that popped up in my Inbox
were 'martyrdom posters' trom a Palestinian kids' magazine:
the girl's head, smack dab on the pavement,
papped like a Halloween queen.

*

They say the future's ours to fizz up,
smash against their tanks. Hey, like, wicked. Thanks.
Suppose I could have talked to Zainab?
What would I have said? Wake up girl,
learn English, get on myspace, join the plebs?

Once I stuffed a letter into one of Mum's blue bottles,
torched the paper with my lighter,
hurled the hot glass trom the beach.
Just another bit of rubbish, bobbing out of reach.

Shaking the Bottle is dedicated to Sunny Singh