The George Crabbe Memorial Poetry Competition

Prize Winners 2005

Commended Poems

2005 Crabbe Memorial Competition - First Prize

Infinite Wheels   

  Unmoving, you move through the mountains
  of Wicklow still. Eyes closed to the coming
  stainless silence, the old haunts never more present.*
  You propel your imagined wheels in unvarying
  circles like the rims of Vico's history where
  cycles of sufferings revolve like riddled leaves.

  I see you pedal impassively along confined
  roads across moors where dark pools reflect
  altering sequences of cloud: the angular
  spaces between pyramids of peat shot through
  with pellets of sunlight, as the sea entices
  in smoked distance with its waves.

  The tramps in your plays bear the imprints
  of cycle clips long after they've lost their bikes:
  they pine for their days of effortless motion:
  happily downhill all the way with the scented
  wind sifting their sparse locks of hair, beating
  back the too solid air in their eternal figure of 8.

  Like you, they long for the stillness
  of cycling motion: that sensuous sail past
  hedged fields where cattle revolve thie jaws
  on regurgutated grass. I see you again,on your
  bed of death, raise your leaded right leg
  to mount once more those infinite wheels.

* In his last years, Beckett, when closing his eyes, was transported
  to the loved landscape he cycled through as a child.

James Knox Whittet