On the road

In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’.

In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’.

Betjeman’s portrayal of road rage in ‘Meditation on the A30’ — ‘You’re barmy or plastered, I’ll pass you, you bastard/ I will overtake you, I will — set me thinking about the misery inflicted by the London Orbital; those hours spent in a state of toddler-like fury with no discernible end in sight. I’m very fond of the A30, for all its faults, and wondered if perhaps the M25 has redeeming features I’ve failed to notice.

Not as far as the comping contingent is concerned. Here’s G.M Davies: ‘Where crazed boy racers alternate/ With gridlock and big rigs,/ And motorists propelled to hate/ Honk like demented pigs.’ You get the picture. David Silverman’s ‘sonnet on a bonnet’ gets the bonus fiver. The other prizewinners, printed below, net £30 apiece.

Apologies to John Plowman, whose adolescent Napoleon was wrongly attributed to Simon Machin in my report on Competition No. 2518.

O secretive, circuitous, sublime

Highway, whereon men’s private lives abound —

Are drivers merely players in the round?

Or cursèd modern mariners sans rime?

Through Hertfordshire, green, leafy, arable

Past Kent and Essex shopping mall and street

All human life …is this thy parable?

As you desist from separating wheat

From chavs, white vans from smart Toyota Ravs,

Nor chavs from chav-nots, e’en have-nots from haves,

‘On Thatcher’s Road, Society is dead,

So love thy fellow traveller instead.

For what goes round will come around, methinks’:

Is this thy song, elliptic, cryptic sphinx?

David Silverman

There are no oils, no perfect unctions,

no salves that pharmacists unshelve,

to soothe one, shifting past the junctions,

9 and 10, 11, 12 —

and heading home at five from Woking,

there’s an existential question:

will our tribe survive this choking,

slowly-throttling, thick congestion?

Only angels, white, seraphic,

could relieve us from our sadness,

trapped inside this hell of traffic,

somewhere in the four-lane madness.