[John Whitworth]

Competition
Wednesday, 27th January 2010
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

In Competition No. 2631 you were invited to submit a poem on a subject of your choice in which the last two words of each line rhyme. There was an element of ambiguity in the wording of this challenge, and a handful of you read it as meaning that the last two words of a line should rhyme with the last two in the line below (rather than the last two words rhyming with each other). All entries were considered.

I was actually thinking along the lines of George Herbert’s ‘Heaven’ (although in that poem the echo rhyme is given its own line), and then of course there are the triple rhymes — a rhyme too far for some, perhaps — of Thomas Hood’s ‘A Nocturnal Sketch’, which a few competitors alluded to.
The worthy winners, printed below, get £25 each. This week’s man of the match is Ray Kelley, who pockets an extra fiver.

In a long drought nobody hoses roses:
Water restrictions (though plants die) apply,
For humans choose to slake their own thirst first.
I see the parched soil in my garden harden,
Each day the floribunda moribunder.
When every petal is off-colour, duller,
How can I strengthen faltering flower power,
Or in tormented trees assuage leaf grief?
What must I do to stem azalea failure
And make the invalid gaillardia hardier?
I weep for pink carnation degradation.
Flagging flag lilies cause no less distress.
I am made tearful, too, by club moss loss;
By shrivelled shrubbery, blubbery.
I feel, when my lobelias languish, anguish.
How long, O Lord? When will it rain again?
Ray Kelley

Though others warned me ‘stay away’,
I’d hang out at a real hot spot,
Where even decent men may stray.
Good sense and judgment I’d not got.

In this degraded dive, alive
With demireps and half-wise guys
And jazz played by a slick jive five,
I met a girl with outsize thighs.

She asked me back to her flat that
Bragged spacious rooms but poor décor:
A sofa where a sad cat sat,
Drab wallpaper, a hardcore floor.

She cuffed my wrists to a spare chair,
and OMG — a cane domain!
I lay there in her lair, aware
I’d never feel quite sane again.
Basil Ransome-Davies

Observing the landscape I lie
And dream of that long-ago snow —
Of the sledge that I’m riding colliding,
Ignoring the shouts of ‘Go slow!’

And, as I’m descending, upending,
The watchers my guiding deriding,
And me in a heap below ...No!
Why should I remember December

Of — what was the year? Disappear,
Such memories! Simply recall all
Those other occasions, when men
Were so slow to take spades up and clear here:

Ah, I had the strength of ten then!
But now — when I’m no longer stronger
Than all those old idlers, I sigh,
‘Let the snow fall apace and lie high.’
Mary Holtby

I’ve a luscious little toy boy,
Though a beautifully bad lad,
He’s a harbinger-of-joy boy
And a makes-his-daddy-glad lad.

He’s as slender as a slim jim,
And a seriously lewd dude.
I could hymn his every trim limb.
You should see him in the rude nude.

Yes I love him in the tight night,
And I love him in the gay day.
He’s my permanently bright light.
Have you anything to say, pray?

I composed this in a terse verse.
It’s a short song, not a long song.
You could write a lot of worse verse.
It’s the right song, not the wrong song.
John Whitworth

I picture Aunt Bea best undressed
Wrapped in a large brown dressing-gown,
Unpowdered face, hair everywhere.
‘God bless the child that brings me tea.’
Though built much like a quarry lorry,
She had a purring, Rolls-Royce voice
And eyes both soft and bright, alight
With fun: ‘What shall we play today?’
She meant it, too — tag, Cluedo, Ludo,
Cricket, hide-and-seek, bezique.
At family do’s we all recall
How she would, on one gin, begin
Her Hattie meets Dame Margot show:
A stately ‘Heffalump Galump’
And on to ‘Tinkerbell Gazelle’.
I’ve never known such laughter after...
W.J. Webster

Dauntless the ship came in to that great strait
where the sweet-voiced sirens plied their age-long song.
But the cunning Ulysses, heroic, stoic,
knew all the wiles of the wine-dark sea. He
gave precise instruction to his crew, who
bound him with hawser to the main-mast fast,
and stopped their ears with softened beeswax packs.
So, when was borne the ethereal sound around,
and they could not hear Ulysses cry, ‘Untie,
untie me, for I fain would stay,’ they
kept their course. And with laughter, after
he boasted the wonders he had heard, averred:
‘Of what we did not hear, we cannot know, so
it is not we, but you who will yet fret
and pine to hear that sensual strain again.
It’s your loss, Boss.’
Noel Petty