Brian Murdoch Progress has led the human race unto The plains of wickedness where we now live; Vile, evil, sinful and degenerate, Lacking our own moral imperative, We can no longer tell what things are right, But err in ethical despondency. No guardian angels keep their eyes on us, But we have been saved by Technology. Break no commandments! They are filming you! And they shall hold your image long and clear, So think again before you kill or steal, Lest you perhaps on Crimewatch might appear. Complain not of the omnipresent eyes Of our new secular society; If there are no gods looking down on us, We need th’ubiquitous CCTV.
Chris O’Carroll I think I’ll never see a tree As fair as these displays. All hail the billboards that adorn Our towns and motorways.
Though nature has its vaunted charms, The landscape and the sky Are useless for alerting us To wares we ought to buy.
Raise high the hoardings that obscure Our view of lesser sights And dazzle us with brand names wrought In multi-coloured lights.
These are the totems of our tribe, The icons of our creed. Commercial messages are all The vista that we need.
Brian Allgar How quaint to see a President’s intestines Embellishing a glass and steel frame. What kind of batty quirk of fate predestines One’s innards to memorialise one’s name?
Yet how delightful, yellow, red and blue, Those tubes, like colons, arteries and veins; How elegant! (At least, they were when new, But now, they’re rusting badly when it rains.) Though some complain the architects were nuts And that the building’s brutal, unrefined, It’s good to know the President had guts, If only of the crude digestive kind.
As for the art inside, one has to chortle At such a joke, organically ripe: To find that Pompidou, like any mortal, Contains within his Centre so much tripe.
S.E.G. Hopkin Others may sing of the thrill of speed, The joys of the open road, But I sing the Sleeping Policeman, Extended outside my abode.
Observe, if you will, his voluptuous curves, His elegant arrows of white; His vertical colleagues have rosters and shifts, But he is at work day and night.
He has no desire for promotion and pay, So happy is he with his lot: Not even the chance of commanding the Met Would tempt him away from his spot.
He has little to do, for the visitors here Are less likely to speed than to rob, But I sing the Sleeping Policeman Who always lies down on the job.
Sylvia Fairley The plants that grew beside the shore are gone; yet we espy a plant that’s nuclear to the core and pleasing to the eye.
The concrete block’s a beauteous sight in this remote locale, the gleaming dome in pristine white is Suffolk’s Taj Mahal.
Don’t mourn the shifting shingle swathe, for Sizewell casts its spell upon the beaches where we bathe and warms the sea as well.
Forget Versailles, Notre Dame, there’s one place I would be, it radiates exquisite charm; ‘Chernobyl-by-the-Sea’.
Katie Mallett I wandered lonely as a cloud O’er lonely moor and rugged coast When all at once I saw a crowd, Nay, some may even say a host Of trees set out upon the sea, An offshore nod to forestry.
And looking back I then perceived Tall stems with arms that twirled and twirled Such beauty I had not believed From man’s inventions in the world. Like guardian angels they must stand To bring new power to our land.
Wimbledon is almost upon us. Your next challenge is to take as your first line ‘There’s a breathless hush on the centre court’ and continue for up to 15 lines in the style of Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 June.
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