Sussex Poets

Delighted to have written this one a few years ago. Even more delighted that it won the Sussex Poets Competition, judged by John McCullough

Graffiti 

I will write my name with a lump of steam coal

on the side of a lorry parked up at a roadside caff.

Or with raw steel, pig iron, scraped on a fence

newly painted. Or fence-paint itself, stolen,

smeared on a sheet drying on a line,

flapping its pleas to the breeze.

Or in black earth churned to mud 

with water from the outside tap 

that rattles against the bricks. 

Or coded in the click of stilettos

tapping the night away on paving slabs,

like the stick of the blind man who catches

the voice of the marshalling yards carried on the wind,

and hears the clinking of a chain ferry.

Collage made by the Rottingdean Writers Group, who organised the competition

'The Farmyard' by Philip Bentall took second place, and third place was awarded to  'Everest' by Brian Fogarty. 

The winning poems can be read here, on the Brighton and Hove Arts Council website -  http://www.bh-arts.org.uk/2013-sussex-poets-competition

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