Meet Eleanor Cantor our 2025 Bill Pringle Poetry Award Winner
30/10/2025
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I tried to capture the importance of their regularity, their meaningful routines and rituals, for the healing process, and the feeling of stability and belonging they inspire in their members.
Eleanor is a keen poet and chose to base her entry around support groups. This poem was not only based on the support group she regularly attends, but also on all the other support groups she has attended, facilitated, read about, and heard about.
Winning poem.
Support Groups.
Here we gather
Birds of a feather
Calling for more of our kind
In parish halls
In backrooms
We erect
Our church of the poisoned and beautiful
mind.
We don’t worship or pray
There is no judgment day
Just “take it a day at a time”
We give ourselves
Grace
A name, and a place.
Here we congregate
Relate
Then separate.
We reconvene
Monthly, we bleed
In relief, shameless
We say: “I am so ashamed”
We answer: “You don’t need to be”
If someone cries, we give them tea
and biscuits.
The biscuits are transformed to endless
empathy in our ten minute breaks
It’s called The Miracle of Jaffa
Cakes.
Sometimes a new face joins us
“I see some new faces” our leader says
The new face is often young and very
quiet at the start.
We are on our best behaviour
Then. We want them to come back.
They listen and ponder it all in their heart.
Maybe they think: “is this how I end?”
So we say: “it gets better”.
At other times they are old, broken,
words burst from them like it’s the first
time they’ve spoken – they tell us
everything
Just as it is and we say:
“Yes. This is how it is
for us too.
You’ve come to the right place”.
We respect the ground rules of this sacred
space, and when we pass each other on
the street, we speak in code or nod.
We meet, for years
In parish rooms and church halls
God help us.
Till then
We help ourselves.