Poem of the week

THIS week we're delighted to be exclusively publishing the winner of the £2,500 Wigtown Poetry Prize, with around 2,000 entries the largest poetry competition in Scotland. At a ceremony in Bladnock Distillery last week, the award was presented to Jane Weir, this year's winner, for the poem we reproduce below. Jane Weir lives in Derbyshire and Manchester, where she writes and runs her own textile design workshop.

Jane Weir

On the Recommendation of Ovid
We Tried a Weasel


It was the first mammal he ever gave me.
He must have trapped it late last night when the moon
disappeared inside a nightclub of clouds
and stars giggling staggered behind.

I found it in the morning, slung like an amulet
across the lapel of my winter coat, flattened to a strip,
satin lined, its snout firm like the tip of a snooker cue,
black tipped and bloody.

In truth he'd tried other things, such as the skins of a dozen
pulverized rattle snakes, the milk from a score
of white iced rabbits, a pot of crayfish.

Then there were the showers of flowers.
Oh yes, the flowers, barrow boy loads of flowers,
such as the biblical Selaginella,
a cruciferous plant that he said –
if I ever reached full term – was believed
as it bloomed to smooth out the suffering of delivery.

He was known to serenade me in my sleep
with those hollowed out Halloween
gourds favoured by percussionists;
for it's said the loose pieces left inside
simulate the rattling sound of an embryo.

What else can I say – we tried and tried.
I practically wore the weasel to death.
Ask yourself, how many times can you scrape
the bottom of a barrel? He shocked me with a rat,
a dead cat dredged from a sacred river bed.
I drew the line. He gave up after that.