Comp 09 1st prize poetry

The Cake Plate by Noel Williams

Not quite secured inside the wardrobe door
by tape that flakes like old skin at the touch,
policy numbers, bank accounts: her life.

We tread like chapel’s muted steps,
perplexed by our reverence
for a red rafia lampshade; button-hooks in a toffee-tin;

the rim of a brandy flask cherry-kissed stark as tulips;
the unrocking chair.
In the hems of curtains she’s sewn half-crowns

to weigh them straight. Drawers
spill her Kodak slides, blazing, a blare
of hats, maiden smiles and Ena Harkness.

Her kitchen smells of memory: gas, tin,
carbolic, fat burned off the grill. There
cowled under a tea-towel, we lift the plate

thrust up like a prize by a Sheffield steel
1920s deco dancer: ta daa!
just as she once had thought she might have been.

She’d marked each climax of our childhood years:
drifted with icing, brandy, candied peel,
her marzipan sweet as sucking your thumb,

crushed into cake-flesh. Around this cold chimney
we’ve picked over sacrificial crumbs:
a family altar by a twilight fire.

Untouched in the pantry,
December sunlight steps on golden bottles,
sculpting dust to dance like the exhaling of a bag of flour.

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