When I set this assignment I was thinking of Pablo Neruda and his odes to subjects as apparently mundane as a lemon, a tomato and ‘a large tuna in the market’.
You didn’t go in for food, but animals featured strongly in the entry, as did buildings — Sixties architecture, in particular. Some strayed into unsavoury territory, musing on pubic hair and other unmentionables. Martin Parker made me smile with his meditation on the marvels of the she-baboon’s bum, which might not be everybody’s cup of tea but is clearly a thing of beauty to the amorous male of the species: ‘So, here’s to the she-baboon’s Technicolor bum,/ and its promise of the amatory action that’s to come…’
Alanna Blake gets £30; the other prizewinners, printed below, £25 each.
It’s not the stripy hair that makes me vexed
Not even with its purples, pinks and greens,
Nor that you look ambiguously sexed
In skimpy vest and torn designer jeans.
Nor yet the scruffy trainers, though their smell
Is redolent of slurry and decay;
These signs that you are yearning to rebel
I can accept are just the teenage way.
But when I see the venom in your eyes,
The way your spittle lands so near my feet,
And hear your callow voice begins to rise
In raw obscenities, then I retreat
Before your clenched fist opens on a blade
And you initiate a needless fight,
Admitting to myself that I’m afraid
When violence and ugliness unite.
Alanna Blake
Hail to the Common Toad,
Greater than Wallum Sedge-Frog,
Let us cherish the Common Toad,
And curse its enemies, grass snake and hedgehog.
Though it be gnarled and warty,
Though it may live till forty,
Yet is it humble, and never haughty,
Therefore, hail to the Common Toad.
What of its orange eyes,
That its pupils are thin black bars?
What that, beneath the seething stars,
Its tongue be sticky with slugs and flies,
That witches appear in its frightful guise?
Though its skin be covered with demon’s drool,
Though its blood be forever cool,
All hail to the Common Toad in its pool.
Bill Greenwell
George Orwell thought they should have knocked it down,
This dream of Gaudi’s dotage, incomplete
And rearing over a delightful town
Like some grotesque dead beast with upturned feet.
Those grisly crenellated spires, as grim
As any Inquisition; void inside,
A superstitious begging bowl for dim,
Gullible tourists hectored by a guide…
The bloody thing is visible for miles,
A monumental error of design
Dwarfing better buildings, finer styles.
How sad to see a great gift in decline.
And yet… and yet… perhaps we should excuse
The lapse, and in a spirit of goodwill
Like Orwell pay our honourable dues —
Our homage — to the Catalan genius still.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Some label you as gruesome, harsh, austere,
Brutal, barren, bleak, rough-edged and cold;
For me you are an icon to revere,
Your surface-texture wondrous to behold —
A moonscape or a mystic Martian scene
With hollows, mountains, chasms, craters,
peaks,
A plateau here, and there a deep ravine,
A wild terrain of crannies, cracks and creeks,
A vista viewed from high above in space,
A maze of ways for wandering eyes to take,
An object of reconstituted grace
That crowns the best mankind can mould or make.
Red-brick and Ivy League fade like a dream
And crumble in the rubble of the past,
The beauty of the breeze block reigns supreme,
May breeze block unis have their day at last!
Alan Millard
Let me tell you of the camel:
How to ride him like a pony,
Though his hump is very lumpy
And his back is very bony,
How his walk is very bumpy
And his kick’ll send you sprawling,
How he spits like a howitzer,
And his hygiene is appalling,
How his character, charisma
And intelligence are dismal,
How his manners are abysmal,
And his temper is infernal;
So, to put it in a nutshell,
What in any other mammal
Is unutterably awful,
Is quite normal in the camel.
John Whitworth
For untold years those hills untrammelled
stood
Profoundly constant in their sculpted grace:
Prevailing skies and seasons set their mood
And bade them show an ever changing face.
Until, one day, the men of venal mind
Perceived the possibility of gain
And so profaned what nature had ordained
By scarring with a power transmission line.
Now loathsome pylons pace across my hills
Obscenely stitched as by the giant hands
Of monstrous surgeons lacking any skills
And having scant concern about the lands.
While man and nature share a common space
It falls to us to care about the place.
Michael Saxby
No. 2508: Blond ambition
You are invited to submit an acrostic poem in support of Boris Johnson’s bid to become Mayor of London, in which the first letters of the lines spell out BORIS FOR MAYOR. Entries to ‘Competition 2508’ by 16 August or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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