[John Whitworth]

They are running an online poetry competition over on Spectator Coffee House with a prize of a bottle of champagne. Closing date Sunday 23rd October. Subject 'Dirt'. They want it to be short, though I'm not too sure what that means. My entry is as follows, and perhaps not short enough. I told them they could ditch stanza 3. The winner of the last comp doesn't scan properly, so it's not Lucy doing the judging, alas:

Dirt

There's clean dirt and there's dirty dirt, my mother said to me
As she spat and rubbed her hanky on our faces.
And the dirty dirt was what you generally got
When you went on holiday to foreign places.

Take a towel and a flannel when you cross the English channel,
And watch out for creepy-crawlies in your shirt.
If there's water you should boil it. Never use a public toilet
Or you'll fall a prey to very dirty dirt.

For breakfast, lunch or dinner, you'd be wise, and so much thinner,
To say no to any filthy French cuisine.
If you stay for just a week you will know whereof I speak;
Frogs' legs, snails and haunch of horse are what I mean.

Yes it all begins at Calais and up every foreign alley
Heaps of dirty dirt are growing by the minute.
And their wicked foreign habits mean they breed like ruddy rabbits
So it won't be long before we're really in it.

[basil ransome-davies]

You're nicely off the mark there with your ethnocentric humour, but do you have more details? Like exact title of comp, address/email, brand of champagne?

Santé!

bazza

[R. S. Gwynn]

Dirt

If dirt is bad, then so are we and so is history,
For all of us were dirty once, as dirty as can be.
Our milieu was the tillage where we bent and harrowed clods
And out of dirt we made our dirty dwellings and our gods.

Soon enough we had a language full of many dirty words
As common terms for intercourse and blasphemies and turds.
We aired our dirty laundry for our tribal mates to view;
It really didn’t matter much, for they were dirty too.

And eventually we found that the constituents of dirt
Could make you ill or shame you with the collar of your shirt.
We also tried to cleanse ourselves of dirty deed and thought;
It helped a bit with nasal things; the rest was all for naught.

It is the dirt we’re risen from and try to rise the more,
But frankly speaking we remain as dirty as before.
If shedding dirt’s a lesson that we civil folk must learn,
We should remember that the dirt is where we shall return.

[Jayne Osborn]

John,

I've put in my Speccie Web ID but can't find a mensh of this comp at all. Where is it to be found? What am I doing wrong?

(Which 'brand of champagne', Bazza? I'll drink any brand, so when you win, if it's not to your liking, may I have it, please?)

[John Whitworth]

What you do, friends, is to go to Spectator Coffee House and then go to Book Blog. And there it is.

[Jayne Osborn]

Thanks, John. Found it, but it's rather tucked away, isn't it?

You appear to have posted Sam's poem, and so has Sam! Do all the entries appear on the page, then?

Both yours and Sam's are 16 lines, fairly long ones at that; even if you drop S3, John, I'm wondering if it would still be regarded as a short poem. It is, compared with 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' or something. They could do with being a little more precise, n'est-ce pas?

[R. S. Gwynn]

I told John that I'd asked the blogmeister to remove the duplicate post, Jayne.