Unlikely champion

In Competition No. 2852 you were invited to step into the shoes of a well-known writer of your choice and submit a poem or piece of prose in praise or defence of something you would not expect them to champion.

You were on top form this week. Martin Parker reveals a lighter side of Leonard Cohen with a nice twist on ‘Bird on a Wire’, while Alanna Blake’s Wordsworth has a soft spot for wind farms. Ernest Hemingway comes out for the League Against Cruel Sports and against sobriety. And J. Seery’s Barbara Cartland shows her true Marxist colours (‘There is no phrase in English more sensuous than “dialectical materialism”’).

Other stellar performers were John Samson, Josephine Boyle, C.J. Gleed and Jamie Burnham, who restyles Arthur Ransome as a health-and-safety nut. The winners take £25 and Frank Upton earns the extra fiver.

My only witness, the damp grass. I close my eyes, let my nerves untangle, feel my breath fall into time with the slow throbbing futility of the universe. I know it is simple. I look, I focus on the small white sphere. There is a promise of flight, of trajectory, of leaving in order to be found again. I act alone. The pointlessness of this crazy business, its point. I swing. I am surprised at how easy it is. Easy, if I unhook myself. As my eyes follow the ball, my entire life arcs out into the uncaring sky, made real by gravity, pulled down and down, but magnificent. One day it will end, lost, destroyed, drowned in a ditch maybe. For now, happy. In my plaids, my brogues, grass-stained, driving, chipping, putting, arriving, leaving again, I am real, I make sense at last.
Frank Upton/Jack Kerouac


 
I wander oft amongst these stately aisles
Where one may many gourmet foods procure;
Entranc’d, I’d rather linger here than tour
The ruin’d temples of Aegean isles.