I meant to do this earlier...
here is a copy of the winning poem as read on the radio. The interviewer was surprised to learn I had never actually been to this site; he said he cycles near it frequently and that I had captured its essence...nice to hear. I found a couple of articles squawking about an American winning the prize in this division for the first time. :~)
Feel free to share but as it is unpublished please do not reproduce willy-nilly...
Boscawen-Un, 30 October, Midnight
This black hood , pierced by stars, hangs about our heads,
a warm drapery, pressing down like stones
Upon the breasts of unrepentant witches.
The hallowed dew darkens our clothes,
torn as we plundered the gorse hedgerow,
branches tittering, alive with nightbirds,
(it blooms gold, but is russet red now, humbled in its descent to winter).
We flung ourselves upon this windblown heath,
attracted by dolmens, by demons,
by the mad epiphanies of a drunken dowser,
into this court of kings and ghosts and dancing maidens,
outlaws of heaven, time-keepers of earth.
Our hearts are become stone, throbbing, laughing,
older than books, wordless, hewn by barley sheaves,
and kissed, blessed, by cusp-born acolytes.
In daylight, we would be as bluebottles crushed upon a rough sundial,
consumed in powdered heat then lapped up by some lumpen hairy splitfoot throwback,
but now,
we are time itself, we gaze into deathless depths,
and see the pointed horns of bulls,
the gleaming eyes of archers,
the stag and the serpent,
blood of the warrior, wine of the mother,
the dust of stars that swirls down paths of ancestor glory,
cosmic ley lines linking planets to moons, summer to autumn,
heart joined to heart, and lip to lip,
confounding childhood lessons of the sky.
Peg Aloi
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