Spectator Competition: Marvelling

For Comp. 3401 you were invited to submit a poem that included the line ‘My vegetable love should grow’ from Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. There were lots of entries, some of them quite fruity (sorry). There are too many worthy runners-up to name names, but the£25 vouchers go to the winners below.

My vegetable, love, should grow,

not end up on your plate,

at least until it’s won first prize

at the village fète.

I’ve never nurtured one so vast,

nor hosed a hue so green –

how can you think of eating it

like some mere runner bean?

But at my back I hear you mutter

It’s just a courgette, after all…

Hands off! – such plants once rooted in

Eden, before the Fall.

I could bang on an age or two

extolling its perfection,

though it and I of course would need

cryopreservation.

Tom Vaughan

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime,

I’d woo you in a bed of foam

And plant my seedlings in your loam.

You’d fondle figs and stroke courgettes,

Slide fingers under insect nets.

My vegetable love should grow,

And swell until the world should know

Of well-hung cucumbers and leeks,

And bloated yams in sunlit streaks.

But always at my back I hear

That old man, Winter, hurrying near:

Your brassicas begin to droop,

My tubers wilt in autumn’s swoop;

So let us plough this fertile bed –

And trade our juices, ripe and red.

Ralph Goldswain

To His Coy Onion

My vegetable! Love should grow – let’s not

To photosynthesis of leafy heart

Admit impediments, remote shallot!

From coy indifference, lady, now depart,

For amor inter allia, onion love

Is sure to bring a tear to any eye,

Our love’s as strong as any garlic clove:

The Posh and Becks of allioideae!

Be not remote, shallot, and be not coy,

Nor hearken to the speciesist naysayers

But onion girl, in front of onion boy,

Remove those shy resistances in layers.

For some, vegetal passion, so humungous,

Takes over like a knotweed or a fungus,

Or moss or bindweed, but with me and you,

It just was planted quietly – and grew.