Poem - MAG Poetry Prize 2010

Smuts

by Wayne Price
Aberdeen, UK

These glasshouse smuts
are hard to kill. Trapped
specks of soot
in dazzles of sun. Snatch one
out of its senseless
yo-yoing in air and crush it
in your palm: it will likely
launch itself again.
 
My brother, aged nine
or ten, fixed one with spit
to the glass slide of a junior
microscope kit. Crippled
not killed, it reared
up as he pored over it,
like a dragon, Wayne!
Like a dragon!
 
Trapping and holding
the fact of anything
is hard enough. Rearing
life! How many griefs
on the head of a pin?
The childish eyes we wore
were never ours; the hands
we still wave, as if in
 
goodbye. Catching,
make sure to kill. We damage
what we hold just for
something to be there.
We die forever.
Something is fishing
the all but nothing
of our own lives out of air.

Added: 31.03.2010

Judges' comments on this poem

06.05.2010

I like this a lot, but I'm not sure what we're looking at here. Are these 'smuts' actually living things? I'm guessing so, but not sure.

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