Those of you with crystal balls will have seen that Janet Kenny and Martin Parker were going to win, and they did! 
(A pleasant change to see some prizes awarded to humorous poems this month.)
Many congratulations Janet and Martin.
The next comp is on a separate thread.
Here's the report by Deputy Editor Tom Fleming:
This month’s subject was ‘clairvoyance’. Sheila Sims wins first prize and £300, generously sponsored by the Mail on Sunday. The element of pastiche in her poem, normally disallowed, has in this case been overlooked. Janet Kenny wins second prize and £150, and the others printed receive £10 each.
FIRST PRIZE
The Gipsy’s Warning by Sheila Sims
There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool
Where it’s cheap to get breakfast and bed,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there on the day they were wed.
A grand little place was the lodgings
With notices pinned on the wall.
‘No sand in the bedrooms,’ ‘No callers’
And ‘Please leave your boots in the hall.’
They didn’t think much of the ocean,
Though they did have a paddle, it’s true.
Then strolled down the mile known as ‘Golden’
To find something else they could do.
What they found was a gipsy called Enid,
A Romany lady, she said,
And Mrs Ramsbottom decided,
For a chuckle, to have her palm read.
She emerged from the tent looking pallid.
‘She told me that we’ll have a son
Called Albert, who’s ate by a lion.’
He said, ‘Can’t you see you’ve been done!
In Lancashire? Lions?' he bellowed,
‘The woman must be round the bend!’
So Albert was born nine months later
And we know what occurred in the end!
SECOND PRIZE –
Clairvoyant by Janet Kenny
I saw it all and even wrote a book,
but no one cared. I saw the cities fall
and told the world, but not a person took
the blindest bit of notice. After all,
who am I? Nothing special, quite unknown.
So if I saw the danger in advance,
big deal? And even after they were shown
the first disaster, no one gave a glance
at what I’d said. So when the second struck,
they failed to link the two. They went ahead
preparing for the next disaster. Luck
is just a fiction by the not yet dead.
I don’t say much, except I sometimes write
small articles and emails to the press.
While they see day, I see eternal night.
I know the fate our experts merely guess.
They laugh a little less now at my words.
The evidence is stronger, but they still
imagine that I’m strictly for the birds.
I do feed birds. We all have time to kill.
The Road Less Trav... by Martin Parker
Jaywalking avian, source of unresolved conundra
from urban highways to remotest dirt-tracked tundra,
since first you hatched what aim could you have had in mind
for trespassing across Man’s Right of Way? Here unkind
Fate brings both our paths together at this bend
on which your purpose and my search for it must end.
My gipsy fortune teller warned,
Beware a hen;
but sadly never told me why or where or when.
It’s too late now for philosophical enquiry.
We’re both wide-eyed and speechless, moments from expiry,
about to lose my chance to ask, and yours to know,
what made you want to cross this stretch of lonely ro...
EPITAPH –
Close by this hairpin bend there lies a man
whose life was shorter than its hoped-for span
by reason of the terminal annoyance
of faulty brakes and imprecise clairvoyance.
ESP In The Afternoon Bus Queue by Robert Etty
Until the phone call came that teatime, we
dismissed it as Joan’s usual make-believe:
she’d seen her nephew, undeniably,
in that pale lad behind, who’d yanked her sleeve
and gaped, and pushed her in his sidelong faint
against the bus shelter’s fresh crimson paint.
And as her brother’s broken monotone
recounted how his son crashed through a wall
at speed, Joan knew she’d felt it in the bone –
three fifty-five, his face, that crumpling fall.
Then second sight deserted her – that is,
she mentioned no more wraiths or prophecies.
Past eighty now, she sits and gazes out
at milkmaids country dancing on the lawn,
church choirs, a raven, pyramids, sea trout,
the stable where a child will soon be born.
The carers say she calls for them at night:
She’s rambling – leave her. Or, somehow, she’s right.
LitRev 'Clairvoyance' results Sept 2011
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