Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘Bloody men are like bloody rockets’: famous poets on the Apollo 11 moon landing

For the latest competition you were invited to step into the shoes of well-known poets and give their reflections on the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years on. Cath Nichols’s enjoyable entry looked back on the lot of the Apollo wives through Wendy Cope’s acerbic eye. Nick MacKinnon was also an accomplished Cope impersonator:

Bloody men are like bloody rockets, you wait nearly five billion years and as soon as one feels up your craters another Apollo appears…

Rufus Rutherford, channelling Basho, submitted a charming haiku. And Robert Schechter, as Ogden Nash, also kept it brief:

To the marvellous event that happened fifty        years ago I dedicate this ode. The first man on the moon, you say? That was        pretty good, but what I had in mind was              Abbey Road.

The brightest stars this week are printed below and win £25 each.

W.J. Webster/Alexander Pope God’s fiat let there be two kinds of light, One bringing day, the other soft’ning night. The gods of myth then made these roles their own, The sun as male, the moon as female shown. Celestially remote, they reigned divine, Their pow’rs bewitching, awesome or benign. But lo! this landing brought them both to ground, Their majesty dispelled, their heads uncrowned. Ex deo machina, Apollo came To yield his fiery chariot — and his name; Selene, ever seen demurely fair, Had all her desert dust and rock laid bare. The heavens’ mysteries all stand revealed When human probing leaves no secret sealed. Such ventures are of negligible worth: Man’s proper sphere of study is the Earth.

Alan Millard/John Betjeman Ring out the mighty bells of Bow And all the streets with flags festoon For, half a century ago, Apollo landed on the moon. I often dream that we were there One giant leap from all mankind, With earth-glow lighting up your hair And bombed-out Slough left far behind.

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