Eratosphere - Results for the final (at least for now) LitRev comp. **A win for John!**

This is the last Literary Review poetry competition -- for the time being, anyway. They are hoping a new sponsor will come along (and offer lots of dosh to the likes of us) ...so I'll start posting new threads if and when that happens. This one bows out, in timely fashion, with a big prize for Mr Whitworth. Congratulations, John! :D

Jayne

Poetry Competition & Results

REPORT BY DEPUTY EDITOR TOM FLEMING

This month’s poems, on the subject of hair, provoked a wonderful set of entries, as if to demonstrate, in the competition’s final month, how good the standard of poems can be. D A Prince wins first prize and £300; John Whitworth wins second prize and £150; the other poets printed receive £10. There is no topic for next month, of course, but it’s possible that we will resurrect the competition – or perhaps come up with a new one – in the near future. Keep your pencils sharp.

First Prize
The lock of hair by D A Prince

Same creak of floorboards in the faded room
a hundred years after the poet died.
A tall vitrine, part of the reverent gloom,
stands modestly and decently aside,
displaying in among the studs, pens, books
a lock of hair, his hair, clipped as he lay
lifeless, beyond all calling back: it looks
as natural as if he’d died today,
this gleaming coil of chestnut-gold, this curl
holding the atoms of last growth, a twist
of energy, a burnished swirl
to fit a finger, one that loved and kissed
it once, and wept, and thought the poems less
at death’s swift cut than this last, stolen tress.

Second Prize
Hair by John Whitworth

As eunuchs praise the love they never had,
Bald as an egg, I sing my TRICHIAD.

The hair that gave the Spartan warriors power,
The hair Rapunzel tumbled from her tower,
The hair that sprouts unbidden under arms,
The hair that grows on masturbators’ palms,
The buttered hair of the ferocious Tartars,
The holy hair of Jesus’ Saints and Martyrs,
The raw, red hair of vagabonds and bad men,
The hair that grows beneath the skins of madmen,
The long, blonde, braided hair of New Age cuties,
The hobbit hair that turns their feet to bootees,
The hair the sirens combed upon the rocks,
The pallid, hairy legs of kilted Jocks,
The hair Porphyria’s lover wound around
Her neck to murder her without a sound,
Crisp, curly hair Lord Byron mourned the loss of,
Heroic hair Delilah proved the boss of,
Soft hair hot walnut shells scoured from the thighs
Of Roman boys, or else Suetonius lies,
Harsh hideous hair of devils, rank and rough,
Light lamplit hair on girlish arms… enough!

Though finer lines Tom Eliot never penned,
My TRICHOMANIA here must have an end.

Hair by Mary Holtby

Silver threads among the gold
Tell the world we’re growing old,
So it seems our value’s less
As our mortal lives progress.
Strange, that when we celebrate
Signposts of the married state,
Quite the contrary appears:
Gold’s the crown of fifty years.
Stop at silver? Then we settle
For a less attractive metal,
Which when seen in terms of locks
Points my primal paradox.

At my Golden Jubilee,
Silver-haired though I may be,
Let me face the downward curve
Trusting in my gold reserve,
And embark, an honoured sage,
On a final Golden Age.

Admiral Byng’s wig by Nick Syrett

How they howled, each barrow boy and hawker:
‘Byng must swing – for giving up Minorca!’
Their Lordships laid a Spithead sentence on his head,
So there we went, to see him shot instead,
And by some shillings passed to a marine,
Crept on the Monarch, which would serve as Tower Green.
Now we were sporting men, so I declared
We’d wager on the colour of his hair:
Strong winds that day, the musket’s harsh rebuke,
‘We’ll see for sure what’s under his peruke!’
White, I said, locks all bleached by sea-lice and despair,
And some said grey or bald or brown or fair,
And as we laughed the Admiral came up, quizzed the tide,
And knelt and prayed, and dropped his handkerchief and died;
The musket silenced all the harbour with their crack
But soon the waves and cries of gulls came washing back.
We never saw his hair: the bandage round his eyes
Worn there lest any musket man should empathize,
Kept all in place, his periwig and cuff of lace
Soft refuge for his stopped, delivered face.
My stomach turned – those breakfast fowls perhaps, the swell,
A sour suspicion too no sherry could dispel,
That convenience and faction wrought this slaughter,
A true man killed, pour encourager les autres.

The falling of the crest by Bill Webster

Not in the time of sere and yellow leaf
But when the sap was fresh and on the rise,
I gathered in the first dismaying sheaf

Of fallen hair, and saw with widened eyes
What others had beforehand hinted at
But I had blindly failed to realise.

The loss became remorseless after that:
Two prongs drove in to join the captured crown;
No force could stand against my genes’ fiat.

From upper slopes the growth line shifted down
To leave a kind of skull cap, pale and bare,
The cartoon feature shared by monk and clown.

There was no cure, I knew I must prepare
To have a Red Sea parting as my style,
And not regret what hardly had been there.

So, decades on, I now may wryly smile
As old friends try to mask the selfsame fate
Made worse because it goes with the denial

Of other tides’ too fast receding rate.
I’m glad what left me billiard-bald so soon
Was hormone, not Death’s knocking at the gate.

What seemed, at twenty, darkness come at noon
With passing years now feels more like a boon.

An Affront by Noel Petty

xxxIn my eightieth year I suddenly observe,
my eyes side-squinting at the bathroom glass,
black hair upon my back, by no means sparse.
I, who was always smooth and golden-haired,
to now by this intrusion be impaired?
xxxWhat barefaced nerve!

xxxWhen young, we named the hillside folk up there
woolly-backs, deeming them low of brow and brain.
Now it is I who, though I still retain
my marbles, still can read, do sums and write,
must now myself endure that ugly slight.
xxxIt’s so unfair!

xxxNo one need know of course. I do not go
on beaches, and it’s decades since I swam.
Besides, it does not alter who I am.
No one will note that slightly simian trait.
Except one eye that can’t be led astray.
For I will know.

xxxCould I be rid of it? Is there some knack,
perhaps involving painful sticking plaster?
Or else at home, my wife trying to master
razor and shaving-bowl, giggling behind?
Or must it stay, forever on my mind,
xxxand on my back?