October Prize Poem

Good poetry is often paradoxical. It can be direct, but also oblique. It can show and at the same time hide. It can state and suggest.

Stephen Fryer’s poem, ‘Fish’, succeeds in all these areas:
• it speaks directly about one thing in order to point to another
• it describes one situation but another is masked
• it states the narrator’s specific feeling towards the aquarium which suggests so much about the narrator’s relationship with ‘darling.

Congratulations, Stephen. If you email me with your postal address I’ll put your ‘prize’ in the post this week.

I’ll post the first prompt for November before the end of the week, and don’t forget to take a look at the daily writing prompts at www.yourmessages.org too.



Fish

I’ve been watching the fish in the aquarium.
It’s an oblong box and it sits in the corner of the living room,
full of brooding water. I hate it.
I think that they would hate it too
if they knew the alternatives, or even
that there were any alternatives.
But they don’t,
do they darling?

Stephen Fryer