Dunedin Public Libraries News & Reviews Blog

100 Years Poetry Competition Winners

Prizes for our centennial competition were awarded on Friday November 28th 2008.

The winners were:

• 1st – Angelino in Dunedin, by Holly Painter
• 2nd – A Rollicking Yarn, by Richard Reeve
• 3rd – Ghost Story, by Jane Woodham

The winning entry appeared in the Otago Daily Times.

Angelino in Dunedin

In the July frosts my breath billows in the kitchen as I dawdle through the dishes

The sink just a hot bath for my hands before heading out with an icy skid on

Barely WOF-ed tyres to avoid the scamper of a creaturely shadow that’s just

A clankity rolling beer can not to mention the trolleys disastrously deserted

On Cumberland by drunken munters on a New World run between couch-fires

While the drink-drive wagon up Great King breathalyses my name and address

Under a blackness thick like saturated ink quite unlike an LA sky with its green-pink

Midnight never conjured before the downtown lights drained out the desert darkness.

When the gales of Northeast Valley give up shaking my drafty villa flat with earthquake

Aftershocks that rouse me through the night and pitch our rubbish into the waters of Leith

And the spring thaw finally finds the South, I strip off my grimy thermal leggings and

Reacquaint my pale shaggy knees with the cool roughness of denim jeans pulled on before

A V-fueled cram session with some mates who dart between the Public and Uni libraries

In search of textbooks they never purchased from the bookstore but skim through furiously

For two days before sitting the exam and then bugger off to the Refuel Halloween gig in

Fluorescent outfits nearly as skimpy as the extravagant costumes draped over goosepimply

Gay nudity at the all-night Halloween Carnival on Santa Monica Boulevard.

When Orion turns precarious cartwheels one-handed across the northern summer sky

The students scurry home to menial holiday jobs, Christmas barbeques with Nana and Grandad

And evenings glazed over at a certain automated hospital soap populated by a rotation

Of the nation’s top talent on their way overseas, a scrubbed stale half hour punctuated

By pseudo-scientific dental diagrams in bubbly toothpaste ads recycled once monthly

While on a Tuesday evening stroll home from the Public Library’s Centenary gala I meet

No one but the twelve teenage boys playing touch in the middle of the vacant intersection

At George and Albany scattering for boy racers only once or twice an hour.

In the Gardens’ dappled autumn shade, I perch on a bench with a bar-coded book

While my lockless bicycle leans against the Gothic iron gate near the lawn where a

Hunting party of sputtering ducks surrounds picnickers and hydrangea bushes bloom

Funny beta fish flowers, nature’s pH paper: neutral pink and cold acid blue

Like the pure South Pacific of St. Clair Beach where no gleaming musclemen

Or gold-painted entrepreneurs throng the sand but only two boys, a dog, and a Frisbee

Blot the picture postcard view and the water’s freshly melted from an iceberg

Positioned offshore where there ought to be at least a couple of oil rigs stalking

The horizon and spitting black tar to be peeled off the soles of your feet.