Showcasing the winners of the Creative Manchester Poetry Competition 2020

I remember how every year

the rivers mutinied.

Terrace-street houses,

wringing out the water,

inch by sodden inch.

Abandoned carpets, and

Scared-eyed dogs,

floating on swan-shaped lilos.

The women gather

with their water-ruined hands.

They blame the council.

Does this Spring count, this season without her human audience? /

Bu bahar sayılacak mı? İnsansız bir mevsimde çiçekler kim için açar?

Her audience was never us.

Her audience are the bees.

As we look on churches

so they look on trees.

Au                                                                                                                               revoir Dear World     

      Lingered dead                                                                                                      in dark dreck sea

                     Naked, quivered                             ---                                                      abstaining tree

                                             Somber                                                                             obsolescence is

                                                       Thy levied                                                                    constellation

                                                                      Contagion                                                  bluntly abrupt

                                                                                   Lord's                                      exquisite creation

                                                                                           Deforested,                           deoxygenated

                                                                                                           Beacon of light        extinguished

                                     Pardon                           for                                 the                                 harm.

“Stay at home!” we yell

from our spacious, leafy gardens

to those going mad

in airless high-rise flats,

dreaming of the park,

wilting like late-spring daffodils.

“We’re in this together” we cry

as we paint rainbows,

hoard food

and snitch on our neighbours.

Climate Change

Spring

Summer

Summer

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Janober

Febember

Margust

Apuary

Maypril

Janinter

Decing

Sumuary

Octautumn

Cairns are emerging from the ice, one by one:

the pass is yielding to us

clothing, reindeer pelts, leather shoes

and feathered arrows

a thousand or so years old. Higher passes still

grip their ice, their histories

(unlike the climate’s trend) yet to be disclosed.

Watch the boy throw

cups of rainwater

onto the peatland blaze,

as if the weak toss &

few drops would douse;

summon the final wisp

Smoke rising like sweat

from wet hot backs;

turf smouldering,

black land clouds

snaking high,

his arms outstretched like pines

There were fires in Australia

but that was a long time ago.

There are fires in Siberia

but they’re miles away.

I go to bed.

There are no fires

in my dreams.

Miroslav Holub said go

and open the door

at least there will be

a draught.

I open the door.

I see fires.

I’m building ditches, ponds

puddled with clay

I’ll grow skeins of watercress

& webbed feet

my skin may turn subtly

responsive, secrete

moisture like a rounded hymen

my vocal sac

could pulse at mud

the boggy wrack of wetlands

Beached and bleached and burned and done.

One day there'll be nothing new under the sun.