[Jayne Osborn]

Good luck everyone.
"You never get a second chance to make a first impression" as someone once said.

Jayne


The Oldie Competition
by Tessa Castro

Competition no 199. Are first impressions truest, or just newest? A poem please, called ‘First Time in the Country’. Maximum sixteen lines.

Entries by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG) or email comps@theoldie.co.uk to ‘Competition No 199’ by 5th February. Don’t forget to include your postal address.

[John Whitworth]

First Time in the Country

Last week Miss Honey hired a bus
To show the Country to our class.
It seemed an awful lot of fuss
To see an awful lot of grass.

Oh please Miss Honey what are those
Huge hairy things that steam and stink?
The beasts that browse? Oh those are cows.
They give us lovely milk to drink.

Oh please Miss Honey what are those
That walk and squawk on skinny legs?
Along the fence? Oh those are hens.
They give us all our breakfast eggs.

It’s very int’resting, Miss Honey.
You’ve shown us heaps and heaps of stuff.
We think the Country’s awfully funny
And now we think we’ve had enough.

[Ann Drysdale]

John, that reminds me of a previous life wherein I was part of something called The Highball Scheme which took kids from the inner city areas of Birmingham (Highgate and Balsall Heath) out into the nearby countryside for camping weekends. The group mood flitted, time after time, like a kineograph from studied boredom through real fear (Wossat?" "It's just an owl." "I know miss, but oo's 'owlin'?) to giddy joy and homeward singing in the minibus.

Those were the days - and probably the basis of my entry...

[John Whitworth]

It was culled from my daughter Katie who took children from Edmonton out towards the wilds of the M25. Cows and chickens alike were unknown to them. Also shoplessness. I was working on a stanza about everyday countryfolk stomping about with guns and wellies looking for something to shoot but I hadn't the room.

By the way, couldn't the Country refer to another country, say France, where they eat unmentionable things and piss out on the street (well they used to)?

[Jerome Betts]

Yes, I was wondering about that, John, You go to a foreign part for the first time and you don't see the country itself, you see a different one called Not-England. Same in reverse with foreign students studying here. I think I know Not-Switzerland and Not-Japan quite well by now,

[Ann Drysdale]

Indeed, John. Though my own experience of my first trip to France was along these lines... http://shitcreek.auszine.com/issue10...-or-reliquary/

[John Whitworth]

Quite lovely, Ann. I went to Paris when I was twenty (not actually my first time but this is poetry i.e. lying). I have part of a poem about it. Perhaps sixteen lines could be salvaged.

[Alan Rain]

'First time in the country' had me wondering: "What country?"
Now I see it means countryside.
Thanks for the clarification.

[RCL]

First Impressions: USSR

I survived the crush of Moscow’s
customs queues at Sheremetyevo
in ‘76, but couldn’t prove
I’d come to teach in Sakartvelo.*

From California, darkly tanned,
I stood alone for several hours,
grilled regarding books I brought,
some by Thoreau on personal powers.

The US consul finally arrived,
confirmed I was American—
invited there to teach those texts.
The Russians thought that I was Georgian.

Customs kept books, but not my copies
of Civil Disobedience: a creed
the Georgians dreamed with Gandhi and King,
fulfilled by peaceful plans to secede.**

*The native language name for Georgia

**The first soviet republic to do so, 4/10/91

[Charlie Southerland]

Cousin Daisy came to us from the city
where she was raised in Brownstone splendor.
She was avante guard and very pretty
with long golden hair and very slender.

She helped me with the chores and milked the cows
and gathered eggs and turned the butter churn.
We culled apples and slopped the Hampshire sows.
She loved to work with me, eager to learn.

But she had indoor plumbing, which we lacked
and had her problems with the outhouse stool
and didn't know why the Sears were stacked
or why the privy smelled like lye. No fool

in her right mind could wipe with tractor pages
or printed sheets of sheets and towels and dresses.
She stamped out mad and shouted; "It's outrageous!"
She slung her hand where shit had made its messes.