THIRD PRIZEWINNER

THERE ARE CHILDREN IN THE MORNING
Greta Stoddart

In a big house in the middle of a dark wood,
little dreamwalker, warm and fuggy with bed

steps carefully down into a hall of giants
who totter, rouged, loudmouthed with wine

through which she wanders with an unfathomable stare.
She is not with us. She is there where

the long black cloak of a dream is still
retreating; where's she's had to turn and feel

her way over the soft, heaving boulders
of her sisters, slumber-drugged, towards

and through the golden frames of doors and down
to this - vision on a record sleeve thrown

among ash and wine, a hair's-breadth away
from the blazing fire - the torso of a woman, naked,

at stake in a technicolour sheath of flames,
her wrists iron-cuffed and raised in chains,

her purple airbrushed eyes lifted to heaven
but vaguely, as if checking the weather.

The child wants to fall into the picture
and fling her arms around the burning figure

but just when you mean to tell her
that you have no love to give her

she'll wake, shivering, wrapped in a sheepskin rug,
in a house shrouded with cigarette fog

and the thick breath of sleepers gorged on sleep
and everywhere an awful, wrecked peace

(the needle will have flung itself ashore
after the long, unwavering night before).

And out of this ruin as if it had been waiting
aeons a blackbird will burst its intoxicated

song of morning, of morning, on bed-locked ears
and the child will smell her own singed hair

as she gazes at the grate where the ash, quietly churning,
will be all that's left of fire, of a woman burning.