Competition | 18 October 2008

In Competition No. 2566 you were invited to submit a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first.

Many of your entries struck a grimly topical note with key lines such as ‘Greed driven swine’ and ‘Gordon Brown is mad’. Others turned their attention to the natural world, but here too the tone remained downbeat and melancholic: ‘So autumn closes in’; ‘The falling leaves’; you get the idea. I was cheered, though, by some of the quirkier openings; in particular, Celeste Francis’s intriguing ‘I’d give you a kidney’ and Martin Elster’s ‘Fido chased a doe’.

The assignment was too easy for clever clogs Bill Greenwell whose double paracrostic appears in the victorious line-up, printed below. Bill and his co-winners get £25 apiece while the bonus fiver goes to David Silverman, who brought a tear to my eye.

And there in a wood —
No piggy-wig stood!
Deceit’s deadly dénouement now loomed.
The predatory fowl
Heard a blood-curdling howl —
Every cat knows that meant they were doomed.
‘Rakish avian fiend,
Evil, pretty and preened,
I know that you don’t give a hoot.’
Now she’s poisoned the mince
And the slices of quince —
When they found them, there lay her sad note:
‘Oh where was my bong tree?
Oh I miaowed up the wrong tree!
Don’t trust any bird with a boat.’
David Silverman

Paracrostic poets
Are apt to have a go,                        
Right and left, although it’s     
Abominably de trop.     
 
Competitors go crazy,   
Restricted by the norm  
(One otherwise feels lazy),
So complicate the form.
 
To others, here’s my plea:
I’d have you understand —
Chaps like me get out of hand.
Put up, I pray, with me.
 
Okay, not big, nor clever.
Expel a brief sol-fa
To scoff at my endeavour.
So, spy my madder art…
Bill Greenwell

Sarah Palin’s specs
Are real killer-diller
Radiators of sex
Appeal up in Wasilla.