[Jayne Osborn]

Yippee! Second Prize of £150 goes to our Martin Parker. Congratulations, and well done for keeping up the spherean presence, Martin.
I much prefer typing out the page from the magazine when ‘one of us’ is on it.

(Next comp is on a new D & A thread)

Jayne

Report by Literary Review Deputy Editor Tom Fleming

There were some very creative takes on the theme of ‘blasphemy’ this month. Nick Syrett wins first prize and £300, sponsored by the Mail on Sunday; with a little rearranging he could even enter the same poem into the current competition for nonsense verse, so deliciously absurd is management jargon. Second prize and £150 goes to Martin Parker, while Noel Petty and Frank McDonald win £10 each.

First Prize
The cry of the intern by Nick Syrett

Lennon and Bono surveyed from the wall
What the chairmen of yore used to gaze on,
But the boardroom was beige now, and open to all,
And renamed ‘Space for Facetime Liaison’,
And there was a change-manager, zealous and hectoring,
Sculpted debate on strategic re-vectoring,
‘Corporate vision v corporate sectoring –
Shaping the process equation’.

Their factories were slowing, their order-books weaker,
The shares and the profits were shrivelling,
Yet still all grew hoarse in endorsing the speaker,
Hands scribbling and eager eyes swivelling;
But then a young intern, ostensibly calm,
Squared his slim shoulders and stuck up his arm,
And asked, to his colleagues’ affront and alarm:
‘Please forgive me – but surely you’re drivelling?’

‘This firm’, he observed, ‘used to lead all the herd
Without all of this dreary distraction…’
Then he stopped, for he sensed that he had not secured
Any stakeholder buy-in, or traction:
Indeed – with a howl of disgust and despair,
The audience beat him to death with his chair,
They resumed their discussion, the better to share
Their example of peer interaction.

Second Prize
Confiteor Deo Omnipotenti by Martin Parker

Before Rome set its adamantine
face against the old Tridentine
all Catholics took the Bread of Heaven
complete with proper Latin leaven
in Missals fat as half a brick,
two thousand pages Rizla-thick
in which it took this boy an age
to ascertain the proper page
for prayers whose arcane rigmarole
they’d said would save his sinful soul.

This Mass which stood tradition’s test
is finished. Ite, Missa est.
Salvation now is near at hand
in language we can understand
and reaching it should be less hard
with Mass pre-printed on one card.
Yet boyhood fear of What Comes Next
seems missing from the English text;
and makes this ersatz Mass, for me,
seem precious close to blasphemy.

Words, Just Words by Noel Petty

Sticks and stones may break my bones,
we cried when we were ten,
but words will never hurt me.
How little we knew then!

Words that assault our cherished myths
are bitter pills to swallow.
They nauseate, erode and burn;
the sticks and stones soon follow.

Of Gods and Men by Frank McDonald

What care I when I blaspheme
For deities that reign supreme
Somewhere beyond the Milky Way
But never mix with men of clay?
It’s men of spite that I abhor
Not Yahweh, Ra or Mars and Thor,
Those pious brutes whose mad decree
Would burn me for my blasphemy.
Our man-made gods that fulminate
With savage love and gentle hate
Make snow and rain when humans dance
With all the miracles of chance.
It’s men that shout YOU SHALL NOT KILL
Unless imposing heaven’s will.
Men pollute our atmosphere
With poison blasts of daily prayer.
No – I have wept when tempest-tossed
In famine, flood and Holocaust
And none of heaven’s helpful throng
Thought fit to hear and fly along.
So when I mock the monstrous line
Of hierophants that claimed divine
Exclusiveness, men, foolish men,
Will want to cleanse me of my sin.