Post mortem

In Competition No. 2946 you were invited to supply a verse obituary of a well-known person who has died in the past year.

There’s certainly no shortage of candidates. Whether more famous people than usual are dying or whether it just seems that way I don’t know, but hardly a day goes by without one of the stars of light entertainment who provided the cultural backdrop to my formative years — Ronnie Corbett, Victoria Wood, Paul Daniels, Anne Kirkbride, Terry Wogan, Cilla Black, Keith Harris — checking into the horizontal Hilton.

Alanna Blake and Max Ross were clever and touching on Ronnie Corbett; Chris O’Carroll, Martin Parker, D.A. Prince and Brian Murdoch also deserve honourable mentions. The entries printed below net their authors £25 apiece and Max Gutmann pockets the bonus fiver.
 

Ms Harper Lee, a scribe of note,
as her first published novel wrote
To Kill a Mocking Bird — a pip.
Her follow-up was nearly zip.
 
A public life was troublesome.
Ms Lee stayed hale. Ms Lee stayed mum.
She gave us nothing from her pen
for more than fifty years! But then
 
she, casting reticence aside,
released a book— and quickly died.
If we’d be well and live, perhaps
we all should learn to shut our traps.
Max Gutmann
 
Topped The Beatles, toppled Kylie,
About as trendy as a Pooh-stick:
Always he was highly smiley,
Picking at the old acoustic —
 
Once he’d been a fruit-crate maker,
Banging in the one-inch nails;
More than twenty-one years later,
Proof persistence never fails —
 
From Waterford and crystal-cool,
With Irish brogue and roguish goat,
In his Aran as a rule,
He never rocked the Sixties boat:
 
He never rocked the teeny screamers
Until they too wore slumberwear —
Rocking all the pension-dreamers
In his sturdy rocking-chair.
Bill Greenwell


 
One finds in all the better soaps
A cemetery of early hopes.
As disillusion eats the soul,
And drink and madness take their toll,
And marriages and flings redouble
A woman’s lot is toil and trouble.