Congratulations to the joint winners for the July 2021 Poem of the Month: Steve Evans for Epilogue and Helen Parsons for Elizabeth at her Writing Desk, as selected by 2021 FSP Anthology editors Louise Nicholas and Judy Dally.
Steve Evans
Epilogue
As he lay dying,
it was someone else’s life
that flashed before his eyes.
Too late to ask for his money back.
No choice but to watch the show.
A blitzing synopsis of past attractions,
it included a tall woman
rising from a bath,
whom he might have loved
if he was not himself,
then two small children holding hands
in a garden more tropical than his own
and, in the background, the glare
of a harbour lit by sails.
He wondered, as the show unravelled,
who had mixed up the reels?
Whose life was this?
The one he missed
at some turn in fate
and should have had?
And who was watching his?
Where was Sharon
and her delicious smile?
Who’d got her and the kids
on their final screen?
Who got his famous dive from Kelly’s Bridge
and his first bike ride?
No raincheck now,
just a blur of dimming lights.
the curtain’s hiss
and darkness.
Helen Parsons
Elisabeth at her Writing Desk
Elisabeth am Schreibtisch 1911 August Macke 1887-1914
She sits and reads. Often I’ve looked at her
and longed for such repose, such concentration.
Today, feeling the shadows of these times
threaten the ones I love, I gaze again.
Her skirt is rose-coloured, the jacket dark,
a red scarf at her throat. The walls are yellow
with a blue panel that may be the sky.
Broad leaves spring luminous from pots.
Her gaze is downward, fully on her book.
This solitude is blessed by him in paint.
Meanwhile outside these yellow walls war brews.
The painter will be dead before he’s thirty.
Catastrophe is always waiting in the wings,
but now he paints, she reads, the bright room sings.