Hornby Dublo by John Atkinson
Press Play by Tom Murray
The Slide by Ann Craig
Paper Aeroplanes by Richard Clarke
Hornby Dublo by John Atkinson
Judge’s comments: “A warm, regretful poem dedicated to a friend who loved model railways, the safety and simplicity of the model train layout intersecting with actual life. It’s not explicitly stated, but it feels as if the poet is travelling to his friend’s funeral.”
Hornby Dublo
For Dougie: 1948–2017
The Tannoy informs travellers the steam-train
to Whitby will be half an hour late; so I buy coffee,
a wedge of stale cake and sit in a daydream,
my mind wandering back to our childhood days
and the hours we spent playing with electric trains.
In later life you built a layout in your loft:
a landscape in miniature with a hole in the middle.
At the centre of this you controlled a world
of many small things: signals rose and fell, cars
queued at the level crossing waiting
for the train to cross, sheep and cattle grazed
in fields of green baize; a barge sailed
beneath a plastic bridge spanning a painted canal.
Milkmaid, farmer, passengers and station-master;
all made to scale, a place for everyone,
where everyone knew their place. And here
you could be a fireman, tending the boiler,
or a driver with an oily rag, the shiny regulator
held by a safe hand. Now a real train changes
the points of my thoughts. Iron wheels
slow to a halt; an engine chuffs and chucks steam
at a platform I’ve taken seventy years to reach.
A carriage door closes, the trip to Whitby
begins, carried on rails of steel that converge
at vanishing points before and after. Beyond
my window distances pass, but down
the corridor I fancy I hear tiny wheels click-clack:
the whirr of a 00 loco racing round a tin track.
John Atkinson was born in the heart of Yorkshire in 1950, and spent the first twenty years of his life growing up and working on the family farm. After leaving the farm a wide variety of work ensued (including mining, grave digging and experimental husbandry for the Ministry of Agriculture) before moving to the city of York and settling into an educational role, to work with adults with learning difficulties. He retired in 2016 and moved up to south west Scotland, where he now finds inspiration in the landscapes of the machair and the windswept seascapes of Luce Bay and the Solent. These provide the stimulus for many of his poems.
John writes: ”Douglas (Dougie) was my cousin, although we were more like brothers when we were kids. In 2017 he had a serious operation which he never fully recovered from. Following this he had a series of strokes, the third of which took away his life. It was three years later that I booked a ticket on the steam train from Pickering to Whitby, a trip I’d been meaning to take for years. The ambiance of the station, the engines and carriages brought back so many memories of the days of steam and, as I try to capture in the poem, how Dougie and I loved to play with our electric train sets.”
Press Play by Tom Murray
Judge’s comments: “You’ve got to love a poem dedicated to Dr Feelgood! Edgy lines recall the music and the stretchy meter of the new-found cassette tapes. Did someone say cassettes were back in fashion?”
Press Play
Historical artifact discovered.
Identified verified as cassettes.
Ancient memory jog scribbled in fading pencil.
‘Top of the Pops 1973.’
‘Hogmanay 1975.’
One cassette a mystery, pencil log erased.
Like Indiana the search is on,
Charity shops traipsed,
Till there it is, buried beneath
Dusty Nintendos.
The rarest of the rare, the Cassette tape recorder.
Only the correct age equivalent will do.
The moment arrives.
Press Play.
The smile jogs the memory.
Wilko Johnston`s guitar slicing through
‘Back in the Night’
‘Roxette.’
‘She Does it Right.’
Living room night club,
Full to the brim with ‘Milk and Alcohol.’
Close eyes and bump tables and chairs,
Harmonica playing electrifying nerve ends,
Memory power keeps age at bay,
While dancing again to Dr Feelgood ‘Down at the Jetty.’
Tom Murray is a playwright, poet, fiction writer, editor and mentor based in Dumfries. His stories and poems have been published in magazines and anthologies in Scotland, and further afield, and his plays widely performed. His publications include Gemini, The Permanent Room and Out of My Head (fiction); There is a Place I Go and The Future is Behind You (poetry); Sins of the Father and The Clash (plays). He is a mentor on the Scottish Poetry Library Next Generation Young Makars Scheme. He is a former Scottish Poetry Library Poetry Ambassador.
Tom writes, “Dr Feelgood were, and still are, one of my favourite groups. Listening to the music in the present, and the memory of taping Top of the Pops from the TV onto cassette, came together and this poem is the result.”
The Slide by Ann Craig
Judge’s comments: “This poem, in a playful Scots, shines with the fun and implicit danger of making and playing on a slide in frosty weather. The Scots words are integral here, drawing you in, exactly recreating texture.”
The Slide
Streets wir fur playin in,
no many caurs in they days.
We pour waater oan the road
so it’ll freeze, make a lang slide.
Ma granny tells ma mammy,
They`re makin death traps,
bit we wur aw weans wance.
Ye hiv tae wear special
slidey shoes, school shoes
are perfect, black wae straps.
If ye make the slide, ye go furst.
Ye take a run, then oan it,
that great feelin o slippin fast,
cauld air whooshin roon yer ears,
screamin, hurtlin intae the abyss,
like a boat oan waater, only nae rudder,
stoapin wisnae easy either.
We play tae it melts,
soaked through,
mittens drippin ice,
bumb numbs wae fawin,
nae broken bones,
this time.
Wance saw a busted nose,
wiz a great faw, loads o`blood,
near a summersault,
goat a big cheer.
Gonnae be froazin
again the morra,
We’re aw ready.
Ann Craig was brought up in a very urban environment in Glasgow but has lived 50 years on a cliiftop village on the North East coast of Scotland. She is a graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy, and holds postgraduate degrees in Community Learning & Development and Philosophy & Logic. Ann likes to write about the magic in everyday life, sometimes in Scots. She is proud to have a poem on The Corbenic Poetry Path. Last summer she was chosen to perform her poetry in front of an Edinburgh fringe audience for a recording for BBC Radio Scotland. She won The Alchemy Spoon pamphlet competition in 2023. The prize was the publishing & printing of her poetry pamphlet Ordinary Magic, available on Amazon.
Ann writes, “I wrote ‘The Slide’ in response to seeing children in my village sliding down an icy slope near a small gully. I thought, that’s so dangerous, and then had to laugh, when I remembered what I did as a child, creating slides on actual roads and pavements. The image came vividly; how it felt to be on that slide. It was so exciting and I can still see and hear the excited screams.”
Paper Aeroplanes by Richard Clarke
Judge’s comments: “Here we have poem as precise and quiet as the paper aeroplanes it describes – their trajectories reflecting family relationships, attempts to connect and reconnect.”
Paper Aeroplanes
After my mother died, my father’s cousin
didn’t send her his usual Christmas card.
I rang him and he told me that when he was a child
and visited my father’s house nestled in bushland,
my father was not allowed to play. He had to study.
But he would make paper aeroplanes and
send them sailing through the window.
Then when I was a boy
and my paper aeroplanes were clumsy,
Dad taught me how to make them compact and capable.
He introduced me to Sherlock Holmes and Biggles,
to nurture my love of books,
of reading, of writing, of pen on paper
even into this era of the email.
He died and as my mother aged
and withdrew
I wrote her letters, stories, popped
cricket cards in the post, wrote her
poems about my early life and her early life
and listened while she corrected them
for accuracy.
Today it’s the first Christmas since my mother’s death,
the 21st since my father’s.
Paper aeroplanes are like Christmas cards…
You see fewer and fewer of them these days.
When they arrive, flying solo,
they sail into our lives briefly,
land, and then lie forgotten.
After forty years teaching poetry to school children in Sydney, Australia, Richard Clarke thought he should try his hand at putting his theory into practice. Despite his doubts that practice would make perfect, he has had poems published in Australia and the USA and, now, the United Kingdom.
Richard writes, “The poem is a celebration of the unexpected playfulness of a parent, a playfulness which was only revealed to me long after his death, but soon after my mother’s more recent death. The facts, if you like, of the poem, are true and I hope that the framing device of the Christmas cards makes the poem a little more accessible at this time of year. Through it I want to express my gratitude to my both parents who taught me to play with words and images as well as with paper.”
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