We’re pleased to announce the winner of the July WWWC: Paul Dignam! Responding to the prompt ‘drawing a line’, Paul’s poem follows its own line of thought, letting the prompt weave its own story.

Read his winning entry below.

Drawing a Line

Flax was linen in latin,
whence came the thread that tied,
the fabric that’s stunning white, but can be dyed,
and the string that, stretched tight and chalk-dusted,
marked a builder’s line,
a limit or a boundary,
and those first lines in the sand:
of possession, power and control.

Thence to geometry,
where a line has length but no breadth,
though technically I think an
interval has a beginning and an end,
a ray goes just one way and
a line goes forever, however far that is.
The horizon line is
that where sky meets sea,
and vanishes to infinity;
but a plumb line is up and down,
made by gravity, for certainty:
You need to get it right or
the cupboard doors won’t fit,
gutters will choke with leaves and
rain will come in under the eaves.

But when is life ever ‘straight’?

There are lines learnt and lost,
when you hadn’t toed the line,
the hundred lines of detention after school;
the broken lines of dipped pen and ink,
the pencil scrawl, the bold lines of font and point,
the lines that made you think;
You can read the lines, and some can read between them,
though some can’t, even when they’ve seen the same words,
thought they spoke the same language:
so much for ‘a common tongue’,
but they’d already signed,
on the bottom line.

Join a line for a bus, or a benefit,
food or a festival,
some might choose a concert,
and line up for a band on their wrist,
but others were chosen, once,
and tattooed and ticked off a list,
line after line after line.
We thought we’d never cross that line again.
Wrong. Again.

In the drawing class she taught us
not to hold the pencil like a writing pen,
not to grip so tight:
more of the elbow and the shoulder, thus –
and let the line be drawn, flowing, from the paper.
It’s easier with ink but irrevocable:
you have to stand by what you’ve said.

You have to encase your object or your scene within a box,
Define your scope,
measure space and proportion and
discern perspective and a viewing point,
and where to look for the light;
to learn about negative space,
(that that which isn’t there helps define what is)
and to know you’ll make mistakes and have to live with them:
I hadn’t realised I’d signed up for
ethics and life skills on a
series of Saturday afternoons in spring.

In the morning on the beach the shore’s swept clean,
and the tide has left the story of its receding,
in ripples of grains, not lines in the sand:
those are the ones that I like best.

Sometimes there are fine lines to be drawn,
Sometimes the line is very clear.
Life and art.
Practice with a pencil, practice with your heart.