[Jayne Osborn]

None of 'us' won money - or approbation - with 'Cowardice'. In view of the 'email is fine, if you really must' (??) I'm guessing that the judges would prefer to read the poems without the necessity of having them printed out first, though I'm still surprised they've said this. Those of us Spherians who've won don't use snail mail, I'm pretty sure.
'Schadenfreude' is a great topic for next time. (Perhaps after that they could have something like 'Fuddy-duddies' )

Send your entry to: editorial@literaryreview.co.uk (or get your footman to deliver it for you )


REPORT BY TOM FLEMING

THIS MONTH’S POEMS were on the subject of cowardice. Stephen Horsfall’s reply to John Donne came in first, falling short enough of pastiche not to be disqualified. He wins £300, kindly sponsored by the Mail on Sunday. Nick Syrett’s ‘The Major Remembers’ wins second prize and £150, and D A Prince and Noel Petty win £10 each, not to mention the approbation of friends and family, for being printed third and fourth. Next month’s subject is
‘Schadenfreude’; entries, which must rhyme, scan and be no more than twenty-four lines in length, should arrive at 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW by 24 May. Email is fine, if you really must, but the judges will not enter into any discussions regarding the results.

First Prize
A Reply to John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet 10’ by Stephen Horsfall
Death, be not proud…
It seems to me like whistling in the dark
To keep your spirits up, this desperate logic
Trying to prove that death is less than tragic,
That death is nothing: John, it doesn’t work.
In the round earth’s imagined corners lurk
The shades of those we’ve lost; and each sad reject
From life and time – each object with no subject –
Would say as much: except the dead don’t talk.

So give it up: admit you’re scared as hell.
Whatever bliss lies on the other side,
Death’s one grim moment will not be denied.
It tolls for you and me, this passing-bell:
And if we were not terrified of death,
What need of hope and love? What need of faith?


Second Prize
The Major Remembers by Nick Syrett

Item by item they went to the attic,
Photographs, souvenirs, stacked in the dark,
Nothing impetuous, nothing dramatic,
Nothing a visiting friend might remark;
For the memories had slipped from their orderly tombs
Beneath the trim paths of his middle-aged days,
To change and to challenge and drive from his rooms,
The pictures of Tunis, Oran and Algiers.
Of Robin and Sandy and Tom whose obituaries
Deepened the still of each Haslemere day,
That stillness that crept into each of his sanctuaries,
Calling the memories to enter and stay.

He tried to diminish them – flawed, superficial,
Yet few friends endured now from whom to conceal
That his years of war now seemed strange, artificial.
His hours of cowardice, vivid and real.
Few though they were: once, returning with orders,
He’d simply kept walking, unseen and unheard,
Towards the high woods and then deep past their borders,
Lost in the bliss of destruction deferred.
Nothing was said of course, any suspicion
Dissolved in the mist and the mud and the rain;

But sixty years later, with gentle contrition,
The Major found peace in that woodland again.


The Denial by Noel Petty

Why did I do it? Well, you’re not the first
to ask me that. I understand your thirst
to tie things up, to know the whats and whys,
but nothing’s clear, even to time-calmed eyes.
I was the strongest one, the one who hacked
an ear off when the high priest’s crew attacked.
Which He restored – how’s that for a reproof?
And thus I kept a little space aloof
during the trial. In the outer court
I had the time to take some serious thought.
If I should own Him, I could well believe
they’d kill me too, and what would that achieve?
Also, He’d told what I was going to do;
could I do otherwise than that? Could you?
I wasn’t lying just to save my bacon,
for how could such a Being be mistaken?
Gods do not err, so what was left to me –
deny my Lord, or His divinity?
The role was planned for me, I realised later –
I was the other necessary traitor.
Did all this reasoning flash through my head
before the brusque disloyal words were said?
Logic or cowardice? Let’s leave it so.
You can conjecture, but I know. I know.


Cowardice by D A Prince

The old tree dropped another branch: their side,
just where the children play (but not, I thought,
in winter storms). She says they could have died,
and our brute tree to blame, and she’s the sort
to work this up, bring other neighbours in
(they’ve lived here longer) and the children (dead
in all her versions) make dispute the sin
she half-expects me to commit.

Instead

I watch my craven self apologise
for how a healthy branch can fall by chance,
promise it all to chain-saws, and despise
easy appeasement and this grovelling stance
that mocks my compromise with bravery
and haunts my nights. I’d said I’d loved that tree.