Dore Kiesselbach has won the Bridport Prize, which carries an award of 5,000 pounds.
Dore Kiesselbach
Dore Kiesselbach has won the Bridport Prize, which carries an award of 5,000 pounds. The award was presented last week in England. Here is Kiesselbach's prize-winning poem:
NON-INVASIVE
Deciding where to put you, my wife and I speak
of size we won't live to see.
It's the overhead wires we're concerned about.
We create space by killing what was there
with poison painted on ten breathing stumps,
amend a transition zone with peat
when the hole I dig reaches clay.
That they'll be ready to connect,
she roughs your roots up, the way
doubt cultivates us, while I hold you
by the slow persistence of your trunk.
In the corner of one eye I glimpse
a stranger sitting out in spring
when you're full grown
and do not envy him but wonder
what he thinks of what he sees.
Did we achieve our woodland paradise?
Putting you in is like stocking
a stream making a comeback
these years. Bending low to form
a raised soil circle for water
I'll pour each day around you for weeks,
my hands assume that basic shape
related to but more perfect than applause.
It’s too soon to tell how much the immigration crackdown is to blame.
