We're delighted to report that Roger McGough has chosen the 3 winning poems.
'So many good poems, so many difficult choices , and so inevitably, choosing a winner proved as difficult as ever, and I do hope that all the poets take away a sense of achievement.
My favourite poems were as different in style as a judge could hope for. From taking to the air disguised as a vulture, to a tainted mother tongue , and to paternal love, undiminished to the end. Each poem was confident in the story it had to tell and told succinctly. The winning poems spoke directly to me and had both clarity and rhythm. Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who submitted a poem. Grateful thanks to all at the Plough Arts Centre who work tirelessly to promote poetry’.
- Roger McGough
The winners of the Plough Prize 2024 are:
1st Prize: Trystan Lewis
photo credit: AndyNpoet
Trystan says: I'm a dad, my dad was a dad and, apparently, his dad was a dad too. I'm told it goes back like that for about two hundred years! Before that it was all mums. This poem is not really about any of those dads, it's not about me and it's not about my dad but, at the same time I think it's about all of those dads and their sons and daughters who at some point will have said, "Don't tell Dad."
Don’t Tell Dad
Don’t tell Dad about my spelling test. Don’t tell him I can’t tell one letter from the next.
And don’t tell Dad how stupid I am, I don’t want him to think I’m any thicker than I am.
But she did tell Dad and Dad did say don’t worry about that, it’s just silly anyway,
It’s not your fault how these letters evolved with loops and dots and sticks and curls,
But here’s a little trick for b and d, just draw a little picture of a b.e.d., a bed, you see?
Beginning and end, that’s where the stick goes, there’s lots of other tricks and I’ll teach you those.
Don’t tell Dad I’m failing at maths. Don’t tell him I can’t calculate the y from the x.
Don’t tell Dad I didn’t even do my best I just closed my eyes and put my head on the desk.
But she did tell Dad and Dad did say don’t worry about that, it’s just silly anyway,
There are lots of great things in this world you can do without a quadratic or a cosine rule,
But let’s draw a diagram and then you’ll see, it’s never as clever as they make it out to be.
Don’t tell Dad I drank so much that I lost certain functions with unfortunate results.
Don’t tell Dad that I cried and I puked and I broke something valuable that cannot be reproduced.
But she did tell Dad and Dad did say don’t worry about that, it’s just silly anyway,
You should have seen me in ’73, when Sunderland won the Cup thanks to Jimmy Montgomery,
And I danced on the table and I fell and broke my nose and your mother always wondered how I ever did get home.
Don’t tell Dad that it turns out that I’m gay. Don’t tell him cos I know it’s only going to cause him pain.
Because Dad believes in families and families look like this, with a mother and a father and a scattering of kids.
But she did tell Dad and Dad did say don’t worry about that, it’s just silly anyway,
There are no rules sent down here from above and there’s nothing wrong with anyone that’s capable of love,
And yes I love my family but one day I’ll love yours and whatever shape that family takes we’ll have an open door.
Don’t tell Dad I left my job. Don’t tell him that I’m working back at the old shop.
Don’t tell Dad I got so stressed and depressed that even the doctor said “It’s probably for the best”.
But she did tell Dad and Dad did say don’t worry about that it’s just silly anyway,
Have you got enough money for your food and rent? I’ll talk to your mother and see if we can help,
But you can’t do a job if it’s making you ill, and you can do a lot worse than a job behind the till.
Don’t tell the kids that we’ve had a diagnosis. Don’t tell them that we talked to the doctor and the nurses.
Don’t tell the kids we saw the pictures on the screen and they pointed at the shadows and they told us what they mean.
But she did tell the kids and the kids came round and Dad said it’s probably just a shot across the bows,
And there’s plenty of time, and there’s no need to worry, but maybe now’s the moment for me to say I’m sorry.
I’m sorry if you ever thought my love came with conditions, like being good at spelling and making wise decisions,
Like being straight or being happy or accumulating wealth, or always being sober with perfect mental health
And I’m sorry if you thought my love could be so easily diminished,
because it couldn’t and it wasn’t and it wouldn’t and it isn’t.
2nd Prize: Mary-Jane Holmes
Mary-Jane walks and writes in the wilds of the North Pennines. Her poetry collection Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass is published by Pindrop Press. Her pamphlet Dihedral is published by Live Canon Press and her novella Don’t Tell the Bees, is published by AdHoc Fiction. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford and has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship to complete a PhD in poetry and translation at Newcastle University. UK.
Gliding
If all goes well, after soaring for a time, I should be able to return safely to your side. Abbas
Ibn Firnas (810-887 AD)
When Abbas came home, wings in tatters and all the poets laughing,
his wife swept the water-clocks and planispheres off the kitchen table
and laid him on it, unglued the vulture feathers from his skin, attended
to his bruised bones with poultices of sage and caper, warmed mallow
to ease his mind and when he fell to fitful sleep, she spliced new struts
to mend the frame, reupholstered it with katan silk, as delicate as moonlight.
How easily the air took her, how quickly she found her place amongst
the peregrine, the booted eagle, clouds soft on her cheek, a landing smooth
as thistledown. When she returned, just before dawn, poor Abbas was back
at his prototype. She dressed his wounds with molasses of pomegranate,
extinguished the oil lamps, lit the stove for breakfast. A tail might help, she said,
smoothing the snags in her tunic, picking out recalcitrant quills. Flight unrecorded.
3rd Prize: Dragana Lazici
Dragana Lazici lives in Cambridge, UK and has a complex background. Born in Romania to Serbian parents, she grew up in Montreal, Canada after her family escaped Communism. She then moved to London to study for an MA in Applied Translation Studies many years ago.
Dragana says: The poem was inspired by how the language of my family, Serbian, has been tainted by territorial changes in the last century. I was born in Timisoara (in the Banat region) which was a modern multi-ethnic city, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When it fell to the hands of Romania after WW2, we were left speaking a dialect which resembled less and less the “real” Serbian. We were neither Serbian nor Romanian. Because we moved to Canada, our identity as well as our version of the language continued to be diluted by English and French and I never learned to write it, although I still speak it with my mother.
my mother tongue is a lonesome bastard
Da! it hits me in the neck. Ne! it stays
like garlic and mustard at the back
of my mouth. A deluded partisan mistakes
me for a member of his clan. 7,000 languages on Earth
and I got the one that’s a cowboy
with an unclean reputation. My mother said it
without saying it: Banat people are an in-between people.
We’re neither here nor there.
7,000 languages on Earth and my first words
sounded nothing like the real thing. We stole so many words
that they’ll build a jail just for us. We say “breakfast”
in German – Frühstück
because they forced rustic bread
down our throats. We adulterated “toilet paper” to
to hartija za vece, because Romanians sell it to us.
We give waiters tips in Albanian, Persian, Turkish
with bakshish.
We regurgitated slanted assertions,
oblique grammar to survive
the line of fire. Our dialect is a picture of us
in time, my grandmother’s mother on her knees,
milking a cow at dawn – a liquid smoother
than coerced words.
I taught my mother how to use an iPhone
in English
like I was feeding her to a bear
like I didn’t know that we would become extinct,
masticated, skinned alive,
slowly, by a purebred medved.