Cheers m'deer

I'm chuffed to be able to say that my poem 'Deer' has won the Norwich Cafe Writers' prize 2009, judged by George Szirtes and landing me a grand to spend in my fine local The Live and Let Live. * It's not a ghost poem as such, but it's certainly to do with hauntings of a kind. I'll be reading the poem on February 15th at the Norwich Cafe Writers' event, which gives us all a great excuse to visit The Fat Cat, Norwich's finest pub (in my humble opinion).

It's been a busy few weeks of readings in Greenwich, Covent Garden and elsewhere and with more to come: I'll be at Black's, Soho, on the 20th Feb with some other excellent tall-lighthouse poets. Lastweek saw me heading home for a local gig at Vox Sheffield. Reading some poems from 'A Pint...' in the bar, I was joined on stage by a sinister Rottweiler, dragging a chain behind it like Marley's ghost. It came up to the stage as I reached the last stanza of my poem, walked in front of me and settled down on the stage. Good job I wasn't reading this poem, or I might have thought it an omen:

Short Measure for the Gabriel Hound

Each time I read a cloud’s dark countenance
or watch two crows stitch out a warning
in the clear blue air, I can’t forget

the Bradwell miners, bound for home
without a lamp to guide them, night as heavy
as the earth they’d toiled beneath all day.

They heard the long grass stir. They stood
dead still. A beam, sharp as a skinning knife
shone from the moon down to the hill

and carved the huge shape of a hound; a dog so quick
they’d barely taken flight before they heard it bay
and felt its harsh breath at their heels. They ran

full speed with burning lungs until the dawn,
until the daylight overtook them and they went,
grim-faced, down to the mine

to meet their certain fate. Remember them
as you lie in bed, when the empty house
has fallen still, and you stare through open curtains

at a starless sky, imagine it’s a dog’s
black flank that passes you, bound
for somewhere else tonight.

* DISCLAIMER: I may actually use the money for useful things, like repairing my laptop, much as I could happily spend a fortune drinking real ale in The Live.