Competition | 20 March 2010

In Competition No. 2638 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of insomnia.

It is undoubtedly a challenge to find redeeming features in unwanted wakefulness. But you are a resourceful bunch, and came as close as it is possible to come to convincing me that an inability to sleep has its consolations. Next time sleeplessness strikes, then, I will embrace the opportunity to tap the riches of the World Service as I indulge in a spot of online shopping and gorge on brandy and pies unwatched by critical eyes. Or, as Barbara Smoker so eloquently puts it, ‘By minimising midnight mini-death,/ I’ll stretch life’s life until my final breath’.

Mae Scanlan nails well those inconsequential but insistent thoughts that bubble up in the small hours and conspire to separate us from sleep; ‘I agonise about our junk-filled attic,/ And why the furnace makes that awful clinking./ I sigh, and poke my husband, whose sporadic/ But forceful snoring interrupts my thinking’. Bill Greenwell, Josh Ekroy and Adam Campbell were equally impressive. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s.

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My linen lover winds me in her lithe
Embrace, her breast a pillow for my head,
Her limbs the sheets that twine mine as I
    writhe
And relish this tryst in her sleepless bed.
I feast my wide eyes on the dreamless dark.
I revel in the long nights I’ve enjoyed
Reclining here declining to embark
Upon the royal road of Dr Freud.
(How hapless he, bedevilled by his dreaming,
Who rises, seeks another couch, and pays
To descant on his brain’s nocturnal teeming,
Contriving that his nights should haunt his
    days.)
Sleep, be not proud. Though some crave thy
    caress,
I find more pure allure in wakefulness.
Chris O’Carroll

Sleep will not come by being willed;
It tantalises those who try
To grasp at it: far better lie
And let all wilfulness be stilled.