Low Life
Poetic justice
Last month I noticed that the only poem I’ve ever written was a suitable candidate for the local literary festival’s poetry competition, whose theme had been announced as ‘landscape as muse’. So I dug it out of the drawer and had another look at it.
I thought the poem excellent. One of the competition rules was that each entry must have a title, however, and mine was untitled, so I sat down to think of one. After some thought, I gave it the title: ‘Snapshot of my eight-year-old son and Mr Allen standing on a hillside above a bay in early autumn waiting for the albino ferret Fatima to come out of the rabbit hole’. We’d been waiting for Fatima to come out, and my boy and Mr Allen had been standing together a little way away from where I was and admiring the view. Tiny cries of gulls and happy holidaymakers were drifting up from the curving sands below. Mr Allen hadn’t long to live, and knew it, and my boy seemed brand new, and I’d made a poem about that moment.
But it was a bit of a mouthful, I realised, and nearly as long as the poem, so I changed it to ‘A lie up’, which is the technical term for what happens when, instead of busily rousting the rabbits out of their homes and chasing them into the hemp nets you’ve carefully laid at the burrow entrances, your ferret eats one and takes an afternoon nap beside the carcass.
As a title, ‘A lie up’ was a masterstroke, I thought, as I slid the poem and the £4 postal order into the envelope. The prize was as good as in the bag. Before sealing the envelope I took the poem out for one last loving look, noticed three extraneous adjectives and neatly struck them out, then I trotted up to the post office to send it off. All I had to do now was sit back and wait for the letter to arrive telling me I’d won the first prize, which was £600 worth of book tokens.
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wonderfulforhisage
July 24th, 2008 8:25amThe above piece deserves a prize. Delicious.
By the way, have you any idea why any man/boy over the age of sixteen wears a beard?
Steve
July 25th, 2008 9:19amPost the poem please
Alexander
July 25th, 2008 7:32pm"By the way, have you any idea why any man/boy over the age of sixteen wears a beard?"
Because most of us need to wait a few more years before we can grow one. And, even if it isn't exactly something that we want to keep long-term, most of us do want to know what we'd look like with a beard.
adrienne Gault
July 28th, 2008 5:20amI wish you would stop writing about nefarious activities such as setting ferrets onto rabbits. I am glad the judge of the poems didn't award you a prize.