Bedford Open Poetry Competition 2009 – 3rd Prize

C.J. ALLEN

A Zoo full of Unicorns

This is somewhere else we’ve never been,

where what is not was once the entire case,

a place for the enraptured and their gaze,

antic, frantic, wonderful, serene.

In reality this is so much more

than creatures from a fabled latitude,

happened upon, like spirits in a wood

or lights that flicker on a tousled mere.

Stooping to browse on acorns or on corn

someone scattered then slipped out of sight,

their delicacy is a sort of strength,

like the brittle twist of sparkling horn,

perpetually moonlit, white on white.

Creation never went to such a length.

I’m never quite certain how these things happen.  (Who was it said, ‘If I knew where poems came from – I’d go there’?)  But if pressed, I’d say it is, of course, a poem about the power of the imagination, with the unicorn doing what it has always done best, i.e. standing-in for the rarefied, the mysterious, the otherworldly.  As far as the zoo part goes, it struck me that if the imaginative force of a single poem could be symbolised by a single unicorn, then maybe a book of poems was rather like a zoo full of them, and that was a sufficiently strange and delightful image to spark a poem.  Anyway, that’s my take on things, and, for the time being at least, I’m sticking to it.