Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Third Prize Winner - Harry Man

Harry Man works as a digital editor and Creative Writing tutor in London. In 2011 he produced a contemporary dance and poetry collaboration for the London College of Fashion. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and journals including the New Welsh Review. In a previous life Harry worked in editorial on a science fiction imprint for HarperCollins. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.

Lost Ordinance, Sussex, 1943

Where the light retreats to blackness around the 14th
hole, there is a tank trap. That strip of ochre snow is

an illusion. That hairline of meltwater along the tunnel
underneath smells of burnt pitch, as if a stray shell

struck the skull of the land, and it bleeds, starless,
motherless. Old snow creaks on the roof, like a ghost

of my father on the landing, or at the head of the kitchen
gathering the patience to glue our lilac dinner plates back

together. And outside is a sea. I'll say it again. Outside
is a sea where the contingent silence is broken by blue and red

timid shadow fish, smelling like, sounding like, pretending to be
- foxes. The sound on the track of alien scamper but turn

and there is nothing but empty lane, hedgerow… out of eye shot
the muffled barks of sheep. We walk further, further into the streetlit

alders, coppices and their snow-stranded outlines flensed
of their leaves, intermingled with the field's fencing. I write

letters in my mind to where my father is stationed in Rawalpindi
as yesterday I uncovered something in the frost, copper-green

and not a bracelet - we have found Roman remains before -
but a watch, my father's, never worn and too big

for me: a present thrown in anger the night before
he left for the war. I cup its face in my fingers

and through condensation I can see glowing still the dial,
the radium hands, stopped at the stroke of midnight.