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’.