2016 CREATRIX POETRY & HAIKU PRIZES
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2016 Creatrix Poetry/Haiku Prizes selected from Issue 30 to Issue 33.
Thank you to Peter Jeffrey, Amanda Joy and Elio Novello for judging the Poetry Prize and to Coral Carter for judging the Haiku Prize.
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Creatrix Poetry Prize Winners
Joint First Prize – Mike Greenacre
From Bar to Spyglass
Joint First Prize – Frances Faith
Untameable Creatrix
Highly Commended – Jan Napier
Wednesdays Are Green
Highly Commended – I.H.M. Lowe
Fascinated By The Bruise
Commended – Ruari Jack Hughes
Here I Am
Commended – Gary Colombo De Piazzi
The Gap (Albany)
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Creatrix Haiku Prize Winners
First Prize – Tash Adams
Christmas countdown
the tic tic tic
of cicadas
Second Prize – Barry Sanbrook
raptors shadow
across rock face
a leaf trembles
Highly Commended – Jan Napier
a winking light
atop the crane
first star
Highly Commended – Jan Napier
lightning in july
a pinched nerve
stabs and stabs
Commended – Jan Dobb
a square of sun
in the breakfast room
marmalade tabby
Commended – Alanna C. Burke
his step
on lemon thyme
surprise visit
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Joint First Prize
From Bar to Spyglass
for Dick Alderson
I don’t often get this far
sip as many words
from another’s glass
but tonight I’m almost
halfway through
this jug of verse
before the first speaker
mounts the stage
to break the ice of words.
And you smile back
your reflection as
the bold face of Galileo
refuting Aristotle’s Laws,
ride the Copernican Theory
that leads your spyglass
further out, past the moon
and it’s myth-givings
towards the limits
of science and
mathematical formula
to what remains
beyond words
Mike Greenacre
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Joint First Prize
Untameable Creatrix
Silent love slinks feline in my breast
With Siam eyes inscrutable she waits
The hunter in the shadows of my heart
Mysterious companion, never friend
How in his presence pride is cast aside!
To purr and gambol kitten-like her wont
So prettily arranged within his sight
She’ll languish and abstain from blood pursuits
But in emotion’s jungle she belongs
And must escape into the velvet night:
There hidden lick the sweat from aching scars
The essence of her truth in primal songs
Wherein are woven secrets of her might
Alone she pours out to the moon and stars
Frances Faith
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Highly Commended
Wednesdays Are Green
She dresses in parrot and shriek, but sits
in the circle unspeaking, thinks opinions
are onions with peas, knows that Thailand
is that neckwear stall at the markets, clearly
recalls playing Mongolia, as a kid.
She was the old boot, always landed on Mayfair.
According to her, men are like old fishing nets:
bunches of nothing connected by testosterone
and ego. She paints smiley faces on old plant pots.
Foists them on friends, and anyone who admires
them, even if they don’t. Consults a psychic
about her health, but lives amidst spiders,
mould, and thrice dunked tea bags, drones a chant
to the full moon once a month, if she can find
the piece of paper, swears to Spiro at the deli
that dolphins are spyware invented by the CIA.
He rolls his eyes and brings her a free latte.
She enjoys gardening, but rips out scarlet
petunias, says they’re cheap and trashy,
remind her of prostitutes. Admits that herring
fillets and skeletons scare her silly.
All those bones! She insists that Wednesdays are
green and shouts at her GP that it’s not his pills
keeping her normal, but prune juice and the I Ching.
Jan Napier
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Highly Commended
Fascinated By The Bruise
I was fascinated by the bruise.
Indigo pure melting into azure haze
like a sky and freedom.
I was fascinated by the bruise.
Started to fall and lose myself
into the deep and darkening hue.
Had to shake myself awake
to go get help for you.
I.H.M. Lowe
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Commended
Here I Am
Too hot and too tired
I left the motel room, left him sleeping
Slipped quietly down the hall
Out into the street
Into the huge night
The more huge night sky
Where stars which died
Millions of years ago
Washed me in their beneficence
Light dripping down
Through the cracks in the dark
Until it was more
The dark demurely retreating
A gentle balance
No one else walked
In the desert that night
None else saw God’s finger
Stretching to touch
One particular speck in the universe
Where a lonely woman wandered
Without special purpose
In a landscape of light and dark
Her thoughts skeining
In fragile filaments
Nets of unformed hopes
Vaguely cast towards the man
I left in the motel room, left sleeping
And dreaming in a different world
Ruari Jack Hughes
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Commended
The Gap (Albany)
Collected on this surviving rock, the tempest
and the eye rolled into a folded arc,
storm stretched and stitched, as clouds billow
in the roil and wash of great southern seas.
Footsteps pound the granite, trash the scrub and moss
to bare stone in runnels strayed to the contour
braced against the wind.
The lonely howl tracks through the sheared cracks.
Calls every death
every tear
for all the ships and all the men
that kissed sunken rocks.
Settled, still as the ocean floor.
And the moon traces the arc of the sea
sets its silver path on the corrugated view
to draw to the horizon with a kiss.
Gary Colombo De Piazzi
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