LitRev 'Public Transport' results
We have two Spherians to congratulate this month: regulars Chris O’Carroll and John Whitworth. Well done once again, fellas!
(Sorry, but I’d just like to remind everyone that it’s not Eratosphere policy to congratulate non-members.)
Jayne
Report by Literary Review Deputy Editor Tom Fleming:
The challenge this month was to write a pastiche of a well-known poet or poem on the subject of public transport. The results were numerous and for the most part marvellous. Bill Webster wins first prize and £300; Janet Kenny wins second prize and £150; all others printed receive £10.
First Prize
Ab uno in omnibus by Bill Webster
Per me si va nella città dolente:
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate
Charon on the blackboard greets
The pallid rising from the streets;
Dead-eyed they offer up their pence
As knowing whither they go hence.
‘All aboard and mind the dog!’
xxxxxxxxDing ding
xxxxxxxxHey ding a ding
Borne alond the arid stream
Through the circumambient roar,
They droop exanimate
Within their stalls
Or stand hard-pressed
Propped husk to husk.
PASS RIGHT ALONG THE CAR NOW PLEASE
They face what comes
Unseeing
Or not seeing.
Death already has their measure
Quantula sunt hominum corpuscula
At Golders Green, at Golders Green
The terminus.
(T S Eliot’s collection of bus tickets is now housed in the Hunter S Norman Repository of Eliotiana at the University of East Carolina. It includes a return to Golders Green framed in onyx.)
Second Prize
Knightsbridge Traffic Jam by Janet Kenny
Half a yard, half a yard,
Half a yard onward.
All in the Knightsbridge bus
Saw their time squandered.
Close by the taxis stayed
Stuck, and the mugs who paid
Taxi fares saw the bus,
Knowing they’d blundered.
Traffic to right of them,
Traffic to left of them,
Traffic behind them.
Baffled they wondered,
Motionless in that hell
How could they hope to tell
Why they had used a bus?
All of them pondered.
When can they be repaid
For the mistake they’d made?
Time unrefunded.
If they had used their brain
They could have used the train.
Onwards it thundered.
Song of My Underground Self by Chris O’ Carroll
I celebrate the Tube and sing the Tube,
And the gap I mind you shall mind,
For every station belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I am mad for all the colours of the Underground map,
For they are the hues of my own city-spanning disposition,
Each sufficed at what it is, none vile, none greater than the rest.
The deep blue of the tourist tube Piccadilly line is my mate and companion,
Reaching as far as Heathrow to make the Underground one with the sky.
Equally I cherish Victoria’s lighter blue and Waterloo & City’s lighter still.
(You are short, but you are no less than the longest line, red Central;
No less than green District, containing multitudes of stations;
No less than black Northern with its throngs of passengers, its divergent routes.)
Venerable Metropolitan’s corporate magenta is not alien to me.
I feel Circle’s yellow surround me as it engirths the central city;
I know it and return its embrace like a lover.
Hammersmith & City’s pink is sweet and welcome to me:
It is the sole colour of no station, but I love it as I love them all.
Bakerloo’s brown and Jubilee’s silver likewise I celebrate.
Not even Overground’s orange and DLR’s turquoise do I omit.
All of these colours tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them.
With these one and all I draw the map of myself.
Journey for a Birth by Alison Prince
with apologies to T S Eliot
A bad flight I had of it,
The worst time for departure,
Hauled in moonlight from a cheap hotel
Sharp enough when it came to prices,
The minibus driver hunched and recalcitrant
The streets shuttered. I regretted
The Golden Arrow with its silken lamps,
Regretted this folly.
We came to an airport smelling
Of industrial carpets and despite
The printout won through dicing silver
On the Internet, about the gate
They had no information.
It was (you might say) unsatisfactory.
A birth reversed at their request, I laboured
To thrust a bag into one not much larger
And set down this, set down
That I will not again
Jostle to climb those icy steps at dawn.
There was a death, certainly,
Of faith in bargains. If I must witness
A reported birth (or anything)
It will be with BA, not these gods.
Trainspotting Celebrated by Sir Walter Scott by John Whitworth
British Railways Goods Train c 1960
Trucks, Trucks, Potterton, Potterton,
Ollershaw, Openshaw, Skelmersdale, Parkin,
Vans, Vans, Wigglesworth, Totterton,
Partridge, McAllister, Battersby, Larkin,
xxxxxxxxWilloughby, Walderslade,
xxxxxxxxRobertson’s Marmalade,
Bannister, Harbottle, Harbottle, Heaney,
xxxxxxxxHutton & Havisham,
xxxxxxxxPickering, Faversham,
Fowler, Fitzackerley, Betjeman-Feeny,
Queen, Pope & Cardinal, Churchman & Vicarage,
Barrington Brothers, O’Kelly & Son,
Longfellow, Longfellow, Mason & Tickeridge
Sattherswaite, Shufflewick, Spencer & Dunne,
xxxxxxxxSpillsbury-Nicholls, U-
xxxxxxxxpritchard & Donoghue,
Peabody, Peabody, Peabody, Small,
xxxxxxxxHenderson-Hyde, Bott &
xxxxxxxxMallison, Sidebottom,
Beeching & Beeching and… nothing at all.
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