Esther is the winner of the 2024 Crabbe Poetry Competition and her poem is entitled XR.
Esther’s four poetry collections are published by Bloodaxe Books. Her third, Grace, was shortlisted for the 2011 T. S Eliot Prize. She’s been involved in the poetry world as an editor and teacher for over 20 years and is currently on the advisory board for The Rialto poetry magazine..
XR
And sometimes I came home from work
to find a scene in the living room of biblical proportions –
all your hundreds of plastic dinosaurs
crammed into cardboard boats or balanced on rafts
made of toy beds, blankets, egg boxes, bits of Lego or whatever
flotsam your imagination had found to cling to –
the whole ocean of carpet filled
with your regatta of extinction and rescue.
It still touches my heart, remembering how tender
you were to each and every one –
from the largest, most expensive Schleichs
to the car-boot casualties – the dog-chewed and sun-faded,
the ones with missing limbs or spines –
how you weren’t satisfied, couldn’t rest,
until we’d allocated each its place of safety
as if you were a little god and these your creatures –
with their small-scale terrors and puny arms,
as if you could be the answer
to all that endless, silent roaring.
Esther Morgan