Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Runner-up - Atar Hadari

Atar Hadari’s publication Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Syracuse University Press 2000) was short-listed for the American Literary Translator’s Association Award 2001 and POETRY magazine recently devoted 19 pages to his translation of the Hebrew epic Lives of the Dead. His poems have won a number of awards including the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan award, the Ellen La Forge prize from Grolier’s poetry bookstore in Harvard, the Writer’s Digest Rhyming poetry prize and he was recently awarded the runner-up prize and reading in the Paumanok Poetry award. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Partisan Review, the TLS and many other journals.

Two Kids

Two kids sitting together
on the bench before the train -
he's got his hand over her bare lower
abdomen, she's chewing his tongue –
then she breathes out
and the whole world
is shrugged away in that sigh
like what could you say to them anyway
she's at the stage of knowing everything
while I pass by with my coffee
and third child in the pram
headed for a train
and wait while my wife gets her luggage in:
we're at the stage of life of knowing less than nothing
just the way this one will get to school today
let alone what they will eat, is a mystery;
no-one is telling us anything
and if they did – would we listen?
The girl and boy get on the train
still holding hands, we cross the track
to the platform where we sit with him between us
-more than a pair of hands, some lungs, a spleen –
¬and so many explanations,
so many breaths to take and show against the sky
a multiplicity of little roads
all riddling the wedding cake like ants:
and he sleeps in between us
and somewhere our future unfolds
like a fan we would not be rich enough
to buy, were it not that our skin is in its coils
and our hands opening like leaves
to catch on something as the train finally rolls.