George Crabbe Poetry Competition 2024 – 1st Prize
Adjudicator: Luke Wright
And sometimes I came home from work
to find a scene in the living room of biblical proportions –
all your hundreds of plastic dinosaurs
crammed into cardboard boats or balanced on rafts
made of toy beds, blankets, egg boxes, bits of Lego or whatever
flotsam your imagination had found to cling to –
the whole ocean of carpet filled
with your regatta of extinction and rescue.
It still touches my heart, remembering how tender
you were to each and every one –
from the largest, most expensive Schleichs
to the car-boot casualties – the dog-chewed and sun-faded,
the ones with missing limbs or spines –
how you weren’t satisfied, couldn’t rest,
until we’d allocated each its place of safety
as if you were a little god and these your creatures –
with their small-scale terrors and puny arms,
as if you could be the answer
to all that endless, silent roaring.
Copyright © 2024 Esther Morgan
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