Hanna’s Parents by David Walrond – 1st Prize 2023

The decision made, they sat with pen and paper

in a brown Mittel European town, dust rising in the rods

of sepia light piercing the bronze leaf canopy,

in late summer’s irritable heat, at a pavement table of a café

that still served them.

Taut tram-wires twitched at intervals against blank sky,

above a gravelled boulevard where people

rarely met their gaze, where unchased pigeons strutted

and the swallows, mobilising, preening,

had begun to look elsewhere.

Everywhere, hot rusting ironwork:

spiked railings like racked weaponry,

ornate wrought balustrades fencing high watchful balconies,

the cages of asleep zoo predators,

grilled shopfronts, chained drive gates,

the starved scores of barbed wire that ran above

a poster-covered concrete wall,

a verboten drinking fountain,

unpainted street lamps of the belle epoque,

rails grooved into grey cobble

smoothed to shining by a century of footfall

and, these last years, drills of drum-led boots.

Grounds dried in thin translucent cups.

Flies sucked on pastry flakes.

A drunk wasp curled itself round a stained sugar cube.

A burst of nasal anthem briefly crackled

from a hidden tannoy, someone testing it.

A cigarette, lit and forgotten, balanced on ashtray groove,

had smoked itself to frail grey powder.

Nearing completion, on their table,

their co-written letter, its warm lies,

soon to be buttoned in the pocket of a child

ticket-labelled, provisioned, over-dressed,

lifted with others onto trains.

The waved at carriages,

pressed faces fading, would head west.

Nearby, unwindowed bolted wooden trucks

stood motionless in heat, waiting,

among the weeds of shunting yards.