[John Whitworth]

Martin Parker in the money. Brian Allgar not quite. Wouldn't you LOVE to be called Virginia Price Evans? So classy!

Lucy Vickery 19 January 2013
In Competition No. 2780 you were invited to write, in the spirit of Aesop or La Fontaine, a rhymed fable involving animals.

Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away the hours in captivity turning some of Aesop’s Fables into verse. La Fontaine did the same, of course, though not from behind bars, some 2,000 years later.

The challenge attracted a large entry. Some of you followed in the footsteps of Socrates and La Fontaine and translated the Phrygian fabulist’s content into poetry; others started from scratch and invented their own cautionary tales, often with a modern twist.

Godfrey Ackers, Alanna Blake and Brian Allgar narrowly missed out on a spot in a hotly contested winning line-up. The prizewinners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each. Brian Murdoch takes the bonus fiver.


A crow, who flew among the trees,
Held in his beak a piece of cheese.
A cunning fox (who’d read Aesop),
Thought he could get the crow to drop
The cheese. He begged ‘sing for me, do!’
But the crow had read La Fontaine too,
And ate the cheese, of course, before
He started on his raucous caw.
Now crow-songs (says Ted Hughes) are rough,
But Reynard couldn’t get enough!
The music really moved this fox,
Who thought: crow-music really rocks!
That bird’s got soul, man, he’s for real!
That’s wickeder than a mousetrap meal!
The moral here is far from random:
De gustibus non est disputandum
Brian Murdoch

Maggie Mouse’s birthday beckoned;
Twenty girls would be invited —
Quite enough, her mother reckoned.
Maggie Mouse, though most excited,
Was too lax to write a letter;
Asked the thrush to send the greeting
To her friends, but that go-getter
Flew above the forest, tweeting:
‘Come to Maggie’s party, Friday!’
On the day, the crowds of roe deer,
Bears and big cats (without ID)
Smashed the chairs and lights and …oh, dear!
It took Mum a month of Sundays
To restore what bears and cheetahs
Had destroyed. So have your fun days,
But don’t trust your news to tweeters.
Virginia Price Evans

In autumn when the forest floor
Was strewn about with nuts galore,
It seemed to one small mouse a puzzle
That given all this food to guzzle
His cousin squirrel set aside
A pile of nuts to take and hide.
But when it was the winter season
The mouse soon understood the reason,
And might have starved had he not clocked
The caches where the nuts were stocked;
He secretly unearthed the treasure
And nibbled mousefuls at his leisure.
The moral is that being wise
Will never guarantee a prize:
Fate smiles on what’s been sagely planned —
But also on the underhand.
W.J. Webster

A chicken met a thrush one day
And was contemptuous of the way
The thrush conveyed her words in song
And stated her approach was wrong.
‘I do my best,’ the thrush replied.
‘That’s not enough,’ the chicken sighed,
‘But don’t just take a chicken’s choice.
Let’s hear how others rate your voice.’
Some ducks agreed to judge the pair
And say which sang the sweeter air.
The thrush began, the ducks were quiet
But for the chicken made a riot
Awarding him a handsome prize
Of wriggling worms and juicy flies.
Which shows that talent tries in vain
When those that judge have little brain.
Frank McDonald

The squirrel, fat and glossy, pinches
Fresh nuts put out for tits and finches
But not to feed immediate need:
He buries them for future greed.
The small birds, meanwhile, starve, for they
Lack food to get them through each day.

The fox who regulates this plot
Also has needs, though his are not
Of vegetarian taste. He eyes
The squirrel. Jumps. His quarry dies.
And buried nuts lie undisturbed:
No use to squirrel, fox or bird.

Moral: The larger beast will make a kill.
The larger beast will eat his fill.
The small birds only ever get
The meanest crumbs, and stay in debt.
D.A. Prince

The strangely-shaped arms of the first pterodactyl
Hung puzzlingly slender and useless and slack till
It found out that if it should jump off a cliff
And hold them at right angles, spread wide and stiff,
It could glide through the air in an elegant fashion.
This stirred up a frenzy of copycat passion
In envious ammonites, young stegosauruses,
Iguanodons, trilobites, vast brontosauruses
Which lined up on cliffs round the edge of Lyme Bay
And jumped. But instead of just gliding away
Their journeys were downwardly vertical. Each
Of them ended stone dead far below on the beach.
Which is why we now find that the Jurassic Coast
Is the graveyard of many — in fact maybe most —
Of those early pedestrian dreamers who found
That, unless you’re a bird, keep your feet on the ground.
Martin Parker