Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2020: Panopticon

Why did we never clock the beauty

of our backdoor scavenger?

His red fur streaking from recycling bins.

 

What about the seasons, did they ever perform

such opera? In little buds and nesting birds,

a sparrow chick flattened to a biscuit in the lane,

a spoon-fed bee that drowned in nectar.

 

Did ever a summer seem so hot and self-absorbed?

Even the air shimmering over empty roads

seemed mime for the watchful.

 

And now for autumn with its early fall.

We never gave a shit before. It was only

that the children wanted conkers for the yard

and the leaves crunched underfoot like crisps.

Recording provided as part of Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020. Used by permission of the author.

Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2020 Winners

Welcome to the Poetry Archive Now! WordView 2020 Collection. For the first time the Archive opened its doors wide to poets from around ...

See the collection

Tracey Rhys

Tracey Rhys’ first pamphlet, ‘Teaching a Bird to Sing’ (Green Bottle Press) was published in 2016. Her poetry and essays can be found in journals including Planet, New Welsh Reader, The Lonely Crowd, the anthology Poems from the Borders (Seren), Bloody Amazing! ed. Gill Lambert and Rebecca Bilkau. Her poetry has been exhibited at The Welsh Assembly and she has worked as a poet in theatre.

Glossary

A special thank you to our WordView 2020 poets.

Chair of the Judging Panel, Imtiaz Dharker, says: “The hundreds of entries we received blew in to the Archive like a breath of pure, unpolluted air from all over the world, revealing something of the time we are living in, some telling it straight, some slant. It was exciting to check in to the Poetry Archive’s Youtube channel every morning and come upon one unexpected voice after another."

See the collectionWatch the full Wordview 2020 playlist
Close