Anne Louise Anglim (Senior Officer, Young People's Library Service) presents Thomas Thomson with the runner-up prize in the Booked! Annual Poetry Competition. Also in attendance are Allan Gordon (Learning Support Librarian) and Fiona Matheson (Area Librarian). Thomas's poem, Coming Home, is published below.

Coming Home

Epimendes, the Cretan poet circa 590 BC,
went to sleep in a cave for 57 years.

When at last our sleeping poet woke
He thought the Gods had played a joke.
He'd slept, he thought, part of the day
And happy homeward went his way
Although he thought it very weird
To find he'd grown a long white beard
But other things began to seem miraculous
His own small village seemed grown more populous
While all around him folk he'd known
Had very old and aged grown.
The effect on him was quite traumatic:
Old schoolfriends all gone rheumatic.
While he as well, to tell the truth,
No more remained a stripling of a youth.

He searched and found the family cottage
Where by himself and in his dotage
His brother stayed there quite alone
For all the older folk had gone.

His brother said:"Where have you been
For years and years you've not been seen?
We sent you out to herd the sheep
And now you say you fell asleep.
For years and years your room I've kept
And now you say you overslept."

All of which was unbecoming
To give his kin a bad homecoming.

An American author* thought
I can use that kind of a plot
But he thought, I think, "I think'll
Call my hero Rip Van Winkle."

*Washington Irving

Thomas Thomson