2020 Creatrix Haiku Prize Winners
Judges: Coral Carter, Rose van Son, Barry Sanbrook and Gary De Piazzi
FIRST PRIZE
speeding taillights–
the cat’s
still eyes
Isabel Caves, Auckland. NZ Creatrix 47
SECOND PRIZE
working from home
the many lightbulb moments
of my fridge
Louise Hopewell, Melbourne. Vic Creatrix 49
HIGHLY COMMENDED
old love letters
the spill I need
to light a fire
Devin Harrison, Vancouver Is. Canada Creatrix 47
out back bride
her dress
tinged red
Barry Sanbrook, Perth. WA Creatrix 46
COMMENDED
father’s pills
the palette of
autumn leaves
Debbi Antebi, London. UK Creatrix 46
his funeral
ice cubes melt
in my whiskey
Maureen Sexton, Perth. WA Creatrix 49
2020 Creatrix Poetry Prize Winners
Judges; Peter Jeffery OAM, Glen Hunting and Glen Phillips
FIRST PRIZE
Lean on Me Colin Young Creatrix 47
SECOND PRIZE
Reading Between My Lines Jessica Vivien Creatrix 49
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Learning My Father Diana Messervy Creatrix 49
A Civil Servants Ode to His Dog Julian O’Dea Creatrix 48
COMMENDED
Friendship Jan Napier Creatrix 49
Bamboo Glade Peter Burges Creatrix 46
Judges Report
My fellow judges this year were Glen Phillips the celebrated mentor of Edith Cowan students, an initiator of our current Perth Poetry Festival, prolific author and illustrator, and both patron and judge of many literary festivals as well as one of our earliest collaborative links with current Chinese literature as represented in both original and translated international anthologies. On the administrative side he was solidly involved in the establishment and maintenance of our main literary centres and an exchange programme with many Chinese translators and critics.
The other judge was Glen Hunting the recent winner of the Northern Territory Short Story award and a consultant to many Perth poets as well as providing assistance administratively to FAWWA before taking up a position in Indigenous Health that covered southern Northern Territory with field trips. His writing interests are poetry, monologues and short stories and he is an impressive contributor from Alice Springs to the ZOOM meetings at the MOON CAFE.
In line with the notion that CREATRIX is club centred rather than academically constrained we were successful in making a first cull of over 54 individual member poems from over a field of 193 possible contributions before moving to a carefully point graded system to determine our final short list that gave us the traditional 6 final awards. It should be remarked that the competition was quite fierce and literally only single points removed several good poems from selection.
Further, we have applied comments from the different judges in random order.
To begin with the equally COMMENDED order we start with Jan Napier’s FRIENDSHIP of which the judge commented:
“This poem highlights the overlooked depths and occasional tragedies that accompany friendship across ages and circumstances. Its resonance stems from its blend of compassion, wisdom, and stoicism; the leavening realism heightens the sense of hope for the nourishment of genuine connection.”
Similarly, we comment on the other equally COMMENDED poem, Peter Burges’s BAMBOO GLADE as follows:
Bamboo Glade by Peter Burges—Here is a poem a little outside the normal experience of most Australians, where trees, or bamboos, talk to the poet rather than the poet ‘talking to the trees’. The sounds made by trees are comparatively uncommon in poetry but here Burges gives us the highly individual sounds from a grove or glade of bamboos in colourful ways: ‘rickety and chittering … ribety as of frogs…clapping each other hard … some slap-n-tickle caresses …’ So here is another environment different enough from the normal to ‘drag/celestial thoughts/into thirsting flesh …’ The vivid imagery of sound and sight reward the unsuspecting reader of this poem with exotic richness which has been expertly expressed by the poet.
Then in ascending order we selected and commented on the HIGHLY COMMENDED poem of Julian O’Dea’s A CIVIL SERVANT’S ODE TO HIS DOG as follows:
In normal contests light verse is often at a disadvantage as it does not have the ‘gravitas’ or ‘earnestness’ of more serious verse, but we must confess that in each CREATRIX issue we look to see what Justin O’Dea , with his inventive and wide ranging verse has written, to bring a smile to our lips and a touch of sentiment into our lives. Here then in Justin O’Dea’s A CIVIL SERVANT’S ODE TO HIS DOG we felt he had reached the HIGHLY COMMENDED level and we were unanimous in giving him the same grading points in doing so.
The other HIGHLY COMMENDED POEM was Diana Messervy’s LEARNING MY FATHER and the comment:
The title of this poem might seem a transformative use of the verbs ‘learn’ and ‘teach’ but in fact it describes the unique process of a child really achieving her own understanding of who her father really is. This process of ‘learning’ is both cumulative and objective. It is not imparted by the parent but is an independent journey. As the poet writes—’I stopped knocking on his shell when I realized/ he could never hear.’ This poem deserves its commendation for both presenting its moment of epiphany (as James Joyce referred to such life experiences) and for its precise and eloquent structure.
And now for the SECOND PRIZE which was awarded to Jessica Vivien’s READING BETWEEN MY LINES of which the judge said:
“This is an artful, sensitive, and insightful rendering of one of the scourges of intimate relationships, which bleeds into the ongoing understanding and acceptance of the self. The individual metaphors all piece together like a jigsaw; they’re original and apt, and the last line delivers the knockout punch.”
Finally, we come to the FIRST PRIZE which was awarded to a poet in WAPI’s current Emerging Poet’s contingent namely Colin Young for his poem LEAN ON ME:
From the very start of our culling, this poem leapt out as potentially the FIRST PRIZE unanimously from all the judges, because of its sensitivity in dealing with the great mystery we poets call love. We envy the Greeks that found so many ways to express the different kinds of love there are, whereas we are anchored down with the crudity of a single word that often leads to misunderstanding. Colin’s subtle interweaving of an epiphanic sharing of love as he descants through the poem moves from the physical exuberance of shared touch, to the joy of mutual revelation of our secret lives, to the pleasant fitfulness of tenderness, and the cross current of a play of gendered desires that lead to the compassionate with-holding of an unrequited love that gives way to a heterosexual heart break. The final stanza asserts that we must take love wherever and however we find it.
What a wonderful result with three unknowns with the key prizes rather than our ‘usual suspects’, many of whom missed out by a single point. Over the year we have a noticed a steady improvement in the quality and number of submitted poems and also the wider and wider appeal of CREATRIX, so much so that the forthcoming ISSUE 50 had a record 82 submissions.
LONG LIVE CREATRIX.
FIRST
Lean on Me
What can be better
than laughing with you
as waves comb into pebbles
and we plunge shivering into warm surf?
We shared our secrets
after that meteor
streaked into nothingness—
as rare as a moment of tenderness.
While I floated,
the Aegean current beneath,
you showed me how,
arm over shoulders, to save someone from drowning.
Each in our capsule
Of self, on the shore
Shifting on uncomfortable stones,
We exchanged our unique coins of experience.
On the way back
we sat near a statue
of a Greek philosopher
who would have understood our bond.
Your last girlfriend
kept you concerned,
while I listened with my eyes
to your compassionate poise.
In the intervals
of silence, smell
of dry leaves. We sat
speaking words richer than jewels.
The next morning,
thinking of you,
I watched someone rescue
a bird fluttering against a window.
Colin Young
SECOND
Reading Between My Lines
You are tracing my scars,
Drawing over the calligraphy on my body
with fingers and lips.
As if it mattered.
As if you’d like to clear the slate for me.
As if you’d like to overwrite it all
with better stories,
stories of your own.
And I smile up into your eyes.
Your touch is tender, tempting
but I know the script too well:
know these gentle imprints you are writing now
will lull me
so I won’t believe
the slash of graffiti that’s coming next
and even less
the inevitable
knife.
Should I be stone then,
turning, blunting every blade
that tries to make me bleed?
Or should I be water,
flowing on and leaving you (like all the rest)
the day we reach that point?
No: I will stay flesh and blood
And proudly so, Rorschaching my own blots
claiming my own past as the myth of me it is.
Only as strangers can we hope to know each other.
Jessica Vivien
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Learning my Father
It is not easy to extract the marrow
of a man who chose to take up
so little space.
And yet long dead he reaches out – sometimes I stumble
upon a trait, recognise him in my DNA
with gratitude or dismay.
From a childhood of unexplained absence and return,
my father, the constant parent, endures in senses and images
sharp as his jaw.
Each morning when he lifted our hair to peck his farewell
on our foreheads my father’s hands smelled clean
with chemical notes.
In his dispensary, encased in a starched white coat, he measured
elements in milligrams weighed portions into capsule cases
counted pills into brown bottles,
blended ingredients on a large glass sheet, smells – eucalypt,
the stink of vitamin B. Once I asked to help, his answer
quiet, firm, No Missy.
At home his workshop smelled of timber and turps, each tool in its place,
honed, ready, we dared not touch, his displeasure though nuanced
scored like a scalpel.
Some fathers read stories, sat children on their knees,
dressed up as Santa, rough-housed, played cricket in the yard.
He was not one.
We learned our father’s play: a riddle, an acronym, a pun,
watched for eyes to soften, corners of his mouth to lift
apportioning affection in gentle micrograms.
He read philosophers, ethicists, avoided T.V., baffled
by sport, by games of any sort, never understood their purpose,
their unpredictable components.
My father’s sole antagonist was Kikuyu grass.
In shorts, long socks, old pair of business shoes,
never one to waste,
and his cloth hat, he sat on an upturned apple box,
head between his bony knees, grubbing out roots and runners
our purring cat beside him.
Sometimes I sat with him in silence, till restlessness sent me cartwheeling
across the lawn, yearning for a glance, but he remained intent
upon his nemesis.
Like an armadillo his body was slight, thin skinned
his shell protecting an honest heart, private underbelly:
a solitary animal.
I stopped knocking on his shell when I realized
he could never hear
Diana Messervy
The Civil Servant’s Ode to His Dog
You met all the selection criteria.
You are a highly acceptable dog
in most respects.
You meet and frequently exceed
performance targets.
You only need light redrafting.
Your policy suggestions are
well-considered.
You help to raise morale.
I find you responsive
and resilient.
You brief in a timely manner.
You have a low carbon footprint
and you recycle well.
Your position is secure.
Julian O’Dea
COMMENDED
Friendship
I see
children hold out thumbs, whisper forever,
wince as steel slits skin in that strongest of vows.
It’s the jars of moon beams they hold on to longest.
I meet
an old man on a park bench who tells me:
friendships are like pets, the longer you have them,
the closer you grow. He nods down at his greying
retriever, strokes the smooth head, and grins.
I ask
a poet I know. He says that friendship is many things
to many people, which is no answer at all,
but I forgive him because we have never been close.
I think
myself, it’s a tinker’s collection
of knotting and knowing, clasped hands, strangers
at bus stops sharing recipes for tomato soup,
the team photo, oat cookies for a new neighbour.
I recall
my father, always wise, saying that every friendship
has its blueness, its sand paper moments.
At times he said, frost scalded seeds blacken and fail,
then there’s nothing to do but wipe a tear, plant more.
Jan Napier
Bamboo Glade
Small bamboos,
thin, rickety, and chittering,
not in fear exactly,
more a ribbeting,
as of frogs
after a round of burping
having tasted enough of evening;
and, deeper in,
big ones clapping each other
hard, all smooth-skinned
and ridged as if for
telescoping down
into mushy earth
where worms, if sliced,
wriggle off in all directions.
But it’s the leaves
I’m here for: some mouthy
tongues; some slap-n-tickle
caresses; some cowled
prayers; all with a green
so immediate it hurts,
like diamond, cutting open
revealing off-track spaces
behind old facades
where life
grabs
by the balls,
drags
celestial thoughts
into thirsting flesh.
Peter Burges