Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam, Paul Freeman and others, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s final verse seems apt:
It’s hard to read a mind in disrepair
Or one as shiny and airtight as chrome:
Two four-year tenants, signally aware
That an official house is not a home.
The £25 vouchers go to the winners below.
Clean, baby, clean. That place is full of germs
and foreign little microbe-alien things.
I want it pure for all my future terms,
bright as the hope my MAGA-presence brings.
Bleach, baby, bleach. Destroy the nasty stains,
the dirty dirt, their legacy of lies.
They let in Covid – make sure none remains.
Kill anything that looks they might be spies.
Scour, baby, scour. Banish the vermin, rats.
Helluva job but worth the hands-on slog.
Get rid of every trace of Democrats.
Those Bidens! Christ! They even had a dog!
Scrub, baby, scrub – down on your knees for God.
Make sure your Marigolds are good and tight.
Flush every non-American off our sod,
Let’s get the White House super-MAGA white.
D.A. Prince
’Tis the night before Donald, and through the White House
Security staff prowl and gun down a mouse,
Melania’s wardrobe is laid out with care,
With crates of fake tan and a toupee of hair,
New flags deck the office: ‘America First’,
The orders of Biden rescinded, reversed,
Republican colours hang over the beds,
For visions of MAGA-land dance in their heads,
Golf clubs in the hallway and photos of cronies,
Bezos and Zuckerberg, flunkeys and phonies,
Fastness and fortress, the warning signs spread,
For unwanted guests are the things they most dread,
The welcome mat flipped and the armoured guards standing,
In case of those terrible Sussexes landing,
They’ve tripwired the front door and muffled the bell,
For even the Trumps find them scary as hell.
Janine Beacham
The golden age starts now, today!
It’s time to sweep the past away
So let’s begin by being bold
And overpaint the White House gold.
Let’s ditch the heat pumps, drill for oil
And heat the rooms until they boil.
We’ll set some sumptuous rooms aside
For Trump’s canoodles with his bride
And keep one plain and bare for guests
Like foreign folk whom Trump detests.
Let’s change Joe Biden’s favourite busts
For those of wealthy men Trump trusts
And make the White House fit for one
Whose golden age has just begun,
Who, saved by God from being slain,
Will make his country great again!
Alan Millard
The Tyrant and his Lady
Will dine apart tonight.
He will not stand her silence
Nor she admit his might –
Each spouse loathing the other
To blot their common plight.
The Tyrant and his Lady
To separate wings withdrawn,
Attending to their banquets
Furious and forlorn,
Look up and gaze with longing
Upon the White House lawn.
The Tyrant and his Lady
Retire to sleep alone.
Dreaming, she finds a freedom
Awake, he craves a throne.
Adrian Fry
In parades Donald, so sure that he’s clever,
And Melania too, enigmatic as ever.
Here come the crackpots, with all the authority
Of an unquestioned and stonking majority,
And Donald is dancing!
Pardoned the Jan the 6th jiggery-pokery –
Any objections are labelled as wokery.
Former foes now are polite and gemütlich;
Ambassador Mandelson’s coming to bootlick,
And Donald is dancing!
Executive orders are flung like confetti;
Gordian red-tape is sliced by machete;
Democrat voters are in deep depression
While Barron is being lined up for succession,
And Donald is dancing!
George Simmers
In my bestseller book it say (so they tell me)
That self-care most important so I eat healthy,
Spinach, kale, flotus seed smoothies, not American junk
But my husband eat garbage, breath smell like a skunk,
Is why I wear big hat, big brim, so he not kiss me,
I not dumb, have high IQ, speak six language fluidly,
Slovakian, Slovenian, Masivstashian
Kashczechin, Morblingian, Serbo-Kardashian.
People say I distant person, enematic, unscrutable
Is because my husband he rich but very unsuitable,
He say we have beautiful relationship, is fake news,
He make me ill, baby, ill and so I refuse
To go to White House though he say we stay there forever
And he call it Trump House, bad idea, very unclever,
So I stay in New York with my up-growing son
And my enema will be even bigger one.
Sue Pickard
No. 3389: Surreal estate
You are invited to submit an estate agent’s blurb advertising a luxury property development on Mars (150 words max). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 26 February. Please note that Comp. 3388, ‘Stockpiling’, asked for a poem and should have requested 16 lines, not 150 words.
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