The Two Turtle Doves Prize

Tom Bland

Kat Peddie

Poem for my birthday, November 2020

Tomorrow I will be thirty-five. Balanced
between two decades and in the centre of one.
I am in the middle
of my life. A way
of counting. I am older than my mother
once was. Mostly I always have been.
Am I still as old as Christ was? My body
still holds the impression of a crown of thorns.
Will carry it always. The surprise
when men touch it & the astonishment
of Christ, & the recoil,
when he says ‘do not
touch me’, & he means ‘do not cling to me’

It’s alright ma, I am only
watching the world dying.
There is not very much I can do to save you & I cannot
remember whether you asked me to.
You keep to your rooms. There are rooms
where it is safe to explore the sadness, & places we will not go.

Soon it will be Christmas and a baby will be born & my mother
a grandmother will be prevented from seeing her child
become a mother. We hear the surface of her sadness.

That which will be handed down will be handed down in other ways.

Welcome to the world, little bird, to everything you will bind yourself with and fly free from. You will never be an island.
On my birthday I will tell you that resurrection is a metaphor, a gift
not only I give to you and I cannot not give it and I wish to.

If you fly well it I will be because you know where the ground is.

It is so difficult to bear a gift, even for a birthday, even at Christmas.

It is true that I do not always want to be in the room
with you. It is not that I do not want you
in the room. A house with you in it might be a thought
of a shape that could hold
us. I don’t often think that stanza also means
stopping point.
I am always in love with men
whose lovers say ‘why can’t you just rest?’ Or
that is what we hear when we speak.
I could rest in a poem and never stop,
there is so much room.

This little gift I give myself to keep me
beholden to myself.

If we were not all
in quarantine you might stop by & then
where would we go?

In quarantine, as Christ was, a desert for forty days and nights, doing something that is not denial. It is the devil that drives a hard deadline. As Christ is, when I say he is a metaphor I do not deny him.

There will still be scenes at the nativity, no-one can deny us this. There are still ways in which I meet you

as if stepping out of a room together, as stepping out of eden, and making our fragile way

James Coghill

This Christmas

I will remember the time
I drank nothing but brandy, only to wake & find
that the day was already upon me.

There was snow & I went for a walk in it.
There were cows in the field
& one casual bullock pursued me

from cattle grid to style,
the entire length & breadth of a hangover.
I will remember holding up

life’s bland promise in one hand
& the ignominy of death by livestock in the other,
then continuing on with my scramble,

as the red poll closed in, with a sort of inevitability,
like a migraine, or conscience.
I will remember his ruddy heat & head-tossing

snort, his steaming bulk & listless malice.
I will remember trying to say something smart,
but instead, being sick in my mouth

just a little. It was the sheer indignity of it,
when, safe at last,
an old Suffolk couple leaned back to laugh:

Yoo shoulda’ jus’ bifft ‘im on th’ nose, bu’.
I did not answer, but trailed home,
more nonplussed than anything.

Behind the front door,
the death match between Christ & commodity
had already begun.