The Oldie 'The Builders' results
Three cheers for Charlie and his first Oldie win! Very well done, Charlie, and congratulations to Annie and John for your winning entries too. Three Sphereans out of four on the page – that’s the kind of result we like. I also like Eugene Hughes' poem - he must have the same builders that I had a little while back!
Next comp is ‘First Time in the Country’ (See new thread)
Jayne
The Oldie Competition
by Tessa Castro
In Competition no 197 you were invited to write a poem called ‘The Builders’, for which there were well constructed entries in plenty. Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the architectonic Chambers Biographical Dictionary going to Charlie Southerland of Arkansas.
One day when we were young and tired of fishing,
we cut some cane poles down along the creek
and lashed them to two saplings with some string
at angle there to shed the rain and seek
the sun in morning from the east back from the bank.
We laid the cross-poles thick across the top
and back and forth the verticals each flank.
We crawled inside and downed soda pop
and went to sleep exhausted from the toil.
When we awoke we covered it with leaves
and ivy vines and dug a bed in soil
there neath the roof and tidied up the eaves.
We slept there many nights before a fire
and cooked the things we’d caught and shot for food.
When we grew up and left the farm, the buyer
bulldozed the hut. He was a city dude.
Charlie Southerland
Barratt zealot, here I stand
Hardhat on and tool in hand
Building houses quick and cheap
Half aware and half asleep
Bricking, clicking, right and wrong
Two across and one along
Dollop mortar, plonk and tap
Spirit level, that one’s crap
Board on top and whack it flatter
Still not right but that won’t matter
Boss might cuss and mates berate yer
But there’s no straight lines in Nature
I’m her child and she’s my mother
Fuckit, chuck us up another…
Ann Drysdale
The Empire builders in their khaki shorts
Who painted every continent with red,
Through English Common Law and English sports,
They made the British great and now they’re dead.
All of them dead as doornails, dead as earth.
My father in Bombay was such a one,
Selected by no accident of birth,
Cambridge mad dog who braved the midday sun,
Ruling from his Collector’s bungalow
Under his sola topee very pukka,
Relaxing now and then to see a show
Or take his pony out and play a chukka.
A sahib and his memsahib, proud and free,
Both young when being young was very Heaven,
And out on the veranda, baby me.
All of this stopped in 1947.
John Whitworth
I have the builders in. They come and go
At will. And never think to let me know
Their schedule. And seemingly they have no guilt
About desertion of my partly built
Extension. They leave their tools and cables and cement
To signify that this implies intent
To finish. But they took the thing that mattered
Most. The dusty, musty paint-bespattered
Tranny. Another job competes with mine –
In the morning as the clock strikes nine
I’ll picture them on site in Hither Green
In overalls with mugs of tea and ‘Dancing Queen’
But wait! What lurks beneath the painter’s sheets?
I dare to hope! My heart now beats
With joy, and not with gypsum-coated sorrow
The radio remains! They will return tomorrow!
Eugene Hughes
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