Ada Cambridge Poetry Award

This poem was highly commended in the recent Ada Cambridge Poetry Award as part of the Williamstown Literary Festival. It's in the anthology, along with the shortlisted and awarded biographical short stories, which you can buy at Hobsons Bay Libraries for $10 each.

Lay you down

For the funeral they calmed your yellow skin with make up

neat hair navy blazer silver buttons shining

I touched your hand   thick and heavy like a slab of fish

couldn’t think of any words to say   was that the day I picked you up?

seems I’ve carried you a long time now

curved shoulders   those vertebrae protruding at the top of my spine

Freud says I look for you in other men

dragging you around like this head bowed   it’s hard to see anything

night time is for resting but this bedroom is cluttered  

too many shoes   lonely earrings   tax receipts swirling in pockets of dust

you slip into my dreams   a puppet staring wide-eyed from a single bed  

unable to move without my help   effort to lift you drenches me in night sweat

once I see you happy   sitting at an outdoor café

wearing the red mohair jumper she knitted   smoking a cigarette

I want to leave you in this place   but don’t know how we got here

silent movie on a far away screen  grey dawn stirs  the image flickers   disappears

Comments

[Andy Jackson]

Great poem, Emilie, so vivid and human and allusive - how did it not win?!

[msdebbie]

Ah Emilie, so glad I requested it! This is moving and evocative. I agree with @Andy - would have won if I were judging the award!

[Mark William Jackson]

Congratulations, fantastic poem, Emilie, as a father of a daughter it's so vivid it hurts. I can only imagine the winning poem was either by the love child of Shakespeare & Dylan Thomas, or some Gina Rinehart style doggerel backed by a billion dollars.

[Matthew John Davies]

I feel very pinned on a regular basis to this musing, Emilie.

[Emilie Collyer]

Thanks all, a very personal poem, so glad it resonates with others outside myself.