The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2021 Second Place

After Lockdown

Gail Dendy

Things will be different, then.

You will not be locked down in another town.

I will touch you as if I’d known you

centuries ago. As if we’d been drawn

as miniatures, twinned with a silver clasp.

Things will be different, then.

I tell you the sun will not set over Italy

when we travel there.

The gondolas in Venice

will always be waiting for us,

their prows like swan’s necks. Black swans.

Your skin will still be beautiful.

You will kiss me.

We will open windows, doors,

unlatch our shining lives.

Our children will fit perfectly in their beds.

The sun will have forgotten how to set.

Things will be different then.

GAIL DENDY was first published in the UK by Harold Pinter, with her South African debut being through Gus Ferguson’s Snailpress. She has eight collections of poetry to her name, the most recent entitled On Days Such as This (Botstotso, 2020). Accolades include winning the SA PEN Millennium playwriting competition and being shortlisted for the Thomas Pringle Award (Prose) as well as for the Sol Plaatje/EU Poetry Prize. She was longlisted for Short Story Day Africa, the Twenty in 20 Short Story Project, and received ‘Highly Commended’ in the UK Poetry Space Competition and the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award for an unpublished novel. Gail is passionate about dance and still does regular dance classes. Gail Dendy’s site can be accessed here.

The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2021 First Place

Small Souls

Stephen Symons

Forgive me, I know today is the day of your funeral but I cannot write for you and I have forgotten how to offer a prayer for the dead. A soft wind has taken you impossibly far from here so I write for the insignificance of an ant that is about to be burnt by a child with a magnifying glass. I write for the coming thirst of the rat and the inquisitive mouse with its back broken by a kitchen trap. I write for the flame-coloured vixen cornered by a dozen hounds and for the top-heavy bear, the sheer weight of her hairiness swaying in anger and the four cubs at her feet, burnt from their den by happy hunters. I write for the soaked wings of a dragonfly’s drowning in a swimming pool, and the bee’s last journey to the rose. I write for the gothic madness of a fly trapped behind the stained glass solitude of a cathedral and I write for a stray cat walking in ever-slowing circles with an arrow through its neck. I write for the teat-heavy bitch being stoned by a trap of boys on a highway. I write for the concrete and straw lives of the lamb, the sow and the cow awaiting the abattoir’s bolt, and the fence-line lope of a lion tamed for the trophy room. I want to be a taxidermist for the soul of the earthworm, the caged finch and flailing octopus in a fisherman’s bait bucket. l want to display their lives from birth to death, from the nest until it is swept up by this ceaseless hurricane. I want to place the smallest of souls – of spiders, squirrels and swallows – in glass and mahogany cabinets (covered in children’s fingerprints) in a museum of great sadness. I will use an antique typewriter to type the stories of their irrelevance on cardboard labels that tell of a pain beyond our bodies. Later, I will step out into the inconsolable cold and offer a sigh instead of a prayer in that dark hall of night. I will walk towards a far-off door opening to a new day that is forever shifting out of reach, and deeper into the murk.

STEPHEN SYMONS has published poetry and short-fiction in journals, magazines and anthologies, locally and internationally. His debut collection, Questions for the Sea (uHlanga, 2016) received an honourable mention for the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Ingrid Jonker Prize. His unpublished collection Spioenkop was a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize for Poetry (USA) in 2015. His second collection, Landscapes of Light and Loss, was published by Dryad Press in 2018. His latest, FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT is published by Karavan Press. Symons holds a PhD in History (University of Pretoria) and an MA in Creative Writing (University of Cape Town). He lives with his family in Oranjezicht, Cape Town.

THE CONVERSATIONS OF CATS

Roy Cotton

The conversation of cats is heard only by the wind.

Nought else where. Where

the somewhere turns the bend;

And teaches words not

To preach Silence. When-

ever the ointmentdunes are

whistling; and some intent

burglar is almost on the

beat. Yes, the conversations

of cats can glisten, like

rubies in the Night.

19/12/84

Featured on 2 September 2021