Macspaunday time

In Competition No. 2440 you were invited to offer a poem which is a pastiche of one or all of the young left-wing poets of the early 1930s, MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. William Empson’s ‘Just a Smack at Auden’ is an affectionate send-up worth looking for. I have room only for one verse:
What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend?
No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end.
Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend.
Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end.

Auden tended to dominate this comp, just as he tended to dominate his contemporaries. Among the non-prizewinning entries that paid impressive tribute to him, those by Ray Kelley and James Womack stood out. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Michael Swan takes the bonus fiver.

Not for us the extravagant gesture, the parade on stilts,
The highwire walk in the spotlight over the crocodile pool.
What we had to say was uttered not from a burning bush,
But from a desk on the fourth floor, overlooking the park.
To those who would listen, we talked of our griefs and failures,
Of time leaking out of the clocks, of ambition fading,
Of childhood in a torn jumper turning its back on us.
We spoke, too, of dole queues in the docks, of empty mills,
Of rusted rolling stock, of war clouds steadily gathering.
Like you, we delighted in small things, a merry-go-round or a painting,
But also in the appalling beauty of roses and snow.
We will be remembered, and that barely,
As honest men who wrote carefully and without fuss
About the great spinning conundrum of it all, stars over slagheaps,
And who never (who ever does?) got the hang of it entirely.
Michael Swan

To day the hypnotic lie,
The old gang’s strategic denial
As lights are extinguished in all bureaux de poste.
Sentries on important viaducts
Hear the emitted pulse, the intelligent code
Troubled by errors of reading
Where snow muffles the frontier
Or the interpreter’s sickness impedes.
Today