Winning poem in the #SussexTogether Festival

Andy said: “I'm only an occasional writer of poems, being largely occupied as a full time artist, a painter of abstracted landscapes. But poetry writing is something I've always done from an early age and a handful of them seem to arrive every year.

“I approach poetry in the same way as making a painting - a seed of an idea comes in from somewhere and I run with it, adding and subtracting until it's honed into something that moves me - it's a wonderful process, you never know what you're going to end up with but that journey is what makes it exciting.

“So back in the Spring during the first lockdown I found myself spending increasing amounts of time in the garden looking and being with the small things you find there - bees and roses particularly held me in sway. I found myself writing an unprecedented amount by my standards and common themes seemed to emerge; ones of acceptance with what is, and the beauty that surrounds us, juxtaposed with an enforced slowing that we rarely experience - the doing of nothing very much.

“Adrift at Night on a Lake dwells on these thoughts and expresses a certain contentment in solitude, while underlining our unique aloneness.”

ADRIFT AT NIGHT ON A LAKE

I am perhaps too in love with

this hooded half light,

embracing its indefinable contours,

dipping my toes in moonlight,

wearing shadows for clothes.

It feels right though to be here in this

small vessel made of trust,

sculling criss cross, curious fish

whose concerns, as small and big as my own

are consumed by this kind black veil.

I am not heading anywhere,

there's no destination that would move me

and no current or past to surrender to

pushing me one way or another,

there's just the dipping of wood on water

the empty spaces between a bird's call,

and sweet scent from a late bonfire,

soon to be charcoal with which,

should I return home

I may make a drawing

of a man adrift at night on a lake.