Poet Esther Morgan Wins Bridport Prize 2010

Esther Morgan

You can’t help but love Esther Morgan!  She writes poetry  like a goddess and when you meet her in person you notice her incredibly gentle and sweet personality. I am straying slightly off topic today but I have always felt a certain affinity with poets. They recreate the human experience. They translate, often, complex abstract emotions into words. Perhaps, it is just that every human wish for: to be heard and to be understood. This could not be truer than for people with rare, sometimes undiagnosed, conditions with underfunded medical research. In the middle of the extreme emotional human drama or crisis – how do you express yourself? Are you even capable of expressing yourself? For to be heard and understood, as the opposite of being ignored or dismissed, means to be validated by your community/society. We do not live in isolation and therefore words carry great power and if you want to, they can change your life.

Esther Morgan is a former work colleague and friend of mine, and if you ever get the opportunity to attend one of her workshops: Take it! Here is a link to some more information about the Bridport Prize and a list of all the winners.     Esther Morgan’s website

And finally the winning poem:
This Morning

I watched the sun moving round the kitchen,
an early spring sun that strengthened and weakened,
…coming and going like an old mind.

I watched like one bedridden for a long time
on their first journey back into the world
who finds it enough to be going on with:

the way the sunlight brought each possession in turn
to its attention and made of it a small still life:

the iron frying pan gleaming on its hook like an ancient find,
the powdery green cheek of a bruised clementine.

Though more beautiful still was how the light moved on,
letting go each chair and coffee cup without regret

the way my grandmother, in her final year, received me:
neither surprised by my presence, nor distressed by my leaving,
content, though, while I was there.

‘This Morning’ is from GRACE, due from Bloodaxe in October 2011.