Poem

Now you have seen the elephant and heard
from an ex-student who blogs an elegy
to his lost left leg (his transfemoral amputation),
and a friend (you visit him in emergency)

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize – now open to all poets writing in English – is one of our most prestigious prizes of its kind. Read this year’s four shortlisted poems.

You are seething; I am worried.
We have read the Greek myths.

This anger of yours feels like
a distant thunderclap

I take a straw broom to the damp leaves on the side path.
The concrete pavers are stained and dirty as they have been
for much of the year. Stooping allows me to see

What’s missing from this floor?
The furniture, but also the reason

Cento after Peter Steele

Is this not running wild?
Silk-white ashes of dream and film
nerve into drama −
into darkness and its minotaur

How likely is it that the fellas who have
moved onto a place down the loop, who
are bricking their crossover, are named
Comatos and Lacon? That they have

In winter the garden
like the back of our mind

a faint young sun.

There’s a still point in the afternoon
when the cross-eyed dogs
in the smudged pet-shop window
are a distraction:

Underneath everything we touch is the smell
Of something too obvious to express
And yet we say there is nothing, nothing at all.