The Saturday poem: Corkscrew Hill Photo

by Roger Philip Dennis Winner of this year’s Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition

All afternoon she counts the sounds

until the fly-specked room crackles with silence.

Even the song thrush noteless. A thick drizzle

trickles rivulets down the window pane,

smears distance on fields, curtains-off hills

and greens the sagged thatch,

aches in the creaking gate and screws

watering eye to misting glass:

a hearse skids slowly up the muddy lane,

blurs in droplets on a spider-web,

spins sideways into darkness ...

...rattling cough of cattle, rusty tractor,

hinge of paint-peeled door, gears

of cars forced to back in one-track lanes,

buzz of pylons spanning the hum

of outboards in the yachtsmen’s creek,

yelp of kids in the converted Mill,

the soft click-click of a camera-shutter

up Corkscrew Hill ...

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