Open Poetry Competition

Tell me, is it hard,
When you’ve slept so long
To rouse yourself, get up?
Or have you spent restless days
Waiting in your wormy beetled bed
For Nature’s summons?
Can you tell
When you yawn and stretch,
Poke that first green fingernail into the air,
That it’s warm enough to rise?
Does the first shower of the season
Wash sleep away,
And the frost, when it comes,
Make you wish you’d stayed in bed?
I guess it’s good to see friends again,
To share dormant dreams
And stories of earth-bound monsters.
Do you make bets, compete;
See who grows tallest? Quickest?
Who has the sunniest cheeks?
And when you’re wide awake and at your peak,
Feet still firmly in the ground,
Do you quake as Mother’s Day draws near,
As florists come with secateurs?
Or do you silently shout
‘Pick me, pick me!’
Vase on table the ultimate aim?
And is it hard to go back to bed
When the rest of the world is just waking up,
To fade and furl and return to the ground?
I think you’re brave,
Coming when you do.

Strange how your life ran from April to April,
born with the daffodils – and eighty years later
buried under them.
I bet you never dreamt, when you wrote that poem,
you were describing something your descendants
would never see?
Ten thousand at a glance? We’d be lucky to see ten dozen,
and they wouldn’t be fluttering and dancing by a lake either,
they’d be in a park, or someone’s garden;
if they hadn’t been killed off by exhaust fumes that is,
or sprayed with herbicide by the council,
or trampled by vandals.
The only things that stretch in never-ending line nowadays
are traffic queues.

What an idyllic life you led,
walking the unspoilt open places;
no Coke cans underfoot
or Tesco carrier bags festooning hedgerows,
no speeding motorists down narrow lanes,
no flattened hedgehogs, or orange doggy-do receptacles.
Just peace, and time to stand and gaze.
No wonder you were gay.

Did you know Herrick’s poem?
He was writing about daffodils long before you;
but where he saw a metaphor for sadness, swift decay and death,
you saw life and hope and beauty,
which I suppose is why, two centuries on, your simple poem
is still read and loved.
In our deepest being how we long to go back,
to see what you saw.
We do not like what we have made,
we would rather dance with the daffodils.

Shortlisted
Entries shortlisted to final judging stage in the Daffodils poetry competition were from: Jane Annable, London SW10; Anne Brooke, Godalming, Surrey; Linda Dawe, Chartridge. Chesham, Buckinghamshire; Margaret Gleave, Ainsdale, Southport; Beryl Haigh, Headington, Oxford; Kaye Lee, Muswell Hill, London; Brian Mitchell, Upton, Wirral; Jackie Mitchell, Laleham, Middlesex; Elaine Murphy, Jebel Ali, Dubai; Mary Pampolini-Roberts, Y Felinheli, Gwynned; Phil Powley, Downton, Lymington, Hampshire..