It's time for tea and poetry

I recently entered a few of my poems into a poetry competition called 'Pop a Poem on a Postcard' (the idea being to keep all poems to 14 lines). The competition was run by the book publishing company Thynks Publications...and three of my poems won runner-up prizes! They will also now be published in a poetry book/anthology amongst other writers' poems later this year. See my *name in lights* here and here and the poems that won runner-up in the below few posts. Note to reader: best enjoyed with tea and cake (preferably of the very chocolatey sort).

Wave

It is time now. Time you must leave;
Uncurl from her greatest current
And surrender yourself; submerse yourself
To the army of readied sand grains on the front row,
Waiting to devour you voraciously.

It is time now. Time you must leave;
Let the wind roughly fold you in two
In a crashing white sneeze -
Your foaming tips will confidently crash
(even if you feel a ferocious fear)
Into a vortex of yellow beach
And some day, I promise you,
You shall sail the seas once more.

Petite Fleur

In a deserted tearoom in 1950s Paris
A man and a woman hold each other and dance slowly
To the edible sounds of a gramophone sitting loudly in the corner
Blowing out Sidney Bechet’s ‘Petite Fleur’ from its brass horn.
Tired patterns on the wallpaper go unnoticed,
Stale pink-iced sponge cakes sitting boastfully on their cake-stands
Also forgotten
As the vibrato notes of Bechet bend around and through the couple,
Sublime wails of clarinet and golden saxophone jazz
Monopolize the walls, the ceilings, the floor; every breath.
Outside a passerby pauses under the damp night, illuminated by streetlamp
But sees only a man and woman gently dancing to silence
And as the song ends the dance continues,
Ghosts of melody still playing out the scene in the tearoom. 

 

Allotment Moment

Look at that sky,
She said, pointing high above
So together we looked up at the untouchable ceiling
Of darkening blues and roses awash with dusk
White wisps of plane tails and spindly purple clouds interweaving
Over our upturned faces
And for a moment as I looked up at the sky
That moment was all that existed
This middle-aged stranger
With her yellow plastic watering-can
and me with my silver aluminum can
Staring out over empty allotment shed-tops and fruit trees
United by the smell of freshly dug soil
And a pink blushed half globe