Competition | 27 September 2008

In Competition No 2563 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose whose lines or sentences end with twelve given words in any order. This is my last week minding the Comp Shop while Lucy Vickery has been on maternity leave. It has been a pleasure and a privilege doing business with you all and witnessing your wit and wisdom. Special thanks to Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Alan Millard and a few other early-bird entrants; if a comp passes the B and B test, the setter knows that it won’t be a total turkey. No less valuable are the later arrivals, like the doughty Scots duo Brian Murdoch and Frank McDonald, whose strong contributions often beef up an otherwise jejune postbag.

This competition was an interesting exercise in word associations: ‘wolf’ tended to prompt nursery memories and fairy tales; ‘gulf’, ‘depth’ and ‘bilge’ maritime themes; ‘plinth’ Trafalgar Square. The winners get £20 each while the bonus tenner goes to Frank McDonald. So now it’s goodbye from me and back to the studio….

Was Caesar just a butcher plagued with angst
About his fits, a monster with no depth,
A vicious brute who fell beneath the plinth
Of murdered Pompey? All the Shakespeare bilge
Of striding the narrow world is good for film,
As though this tyrant thug possessed a breadth
Of wit and wisdom; but he liked his pint
Of blood in Gaul where clemency was scarce.
Sentimental lies have made the month
Of March’s Ides a saint’s day for this wolf.
Perhaps Calpurnia, no treasured sylph,
Saw ’twixt the man and myth a yawning gulf.
Frank McDonald