Ep. 29 Winner of 2022’s Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize: ‘December Moth outside a care-home window’

The month in this poem, which appears to a shadowy person confined in a car home, is a real month. The December month is a sort of agar month. It's nocturnal. During the flying stage of its life, it doesn't eat. It's common, frequent in woodland and old mature gardens. It's seldom seen, but will come to light as it does, unbidden in my poem called December month outside a car home window. Sick, furry, balaclava'd neck, shaggy, charcoal help, a cream hair streak, wings fringed with cork, and feathery snowshoes on its head. It came in a gale, fooled by a mooney lamp, and stayed a week on the sill outside the chair you'd take. With gale after gale, more of the moss was lost, and 10 a first. Scales flake to like pixels, quilted your brain cells, a patchwork of negative space. By the end of the week, the moss bore its wings off the shoulder, like the net of dropped stitches in an old punk mohair jumper. You could see through to the parsnip curl of naked thorax. Only knew it was alive because it hadn't moved at all. It's a clung for so long that you're glowing impossible threshold. Thank you for listening to this Keatshellee podcast for the Keatshellee and Young Romantics writing prizes. For more news about this year's prize, please visit our website Keatshellee.org forward slash prizes, or follow us on Twitter at Keatshellee. [MUSIC]