Dear John Winners
Competition
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition.
In Competition 2625 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of any well-known person named John (a real person, living or dead, or a character from literature).
The verse tributes poured in, to Johns I had heard of — Prescott, the Baptist, Donne — and those I had not: ‘John Harington, my jo, John,/ You’re a hero to my mind/ For inventing water closets,/ Great good for all mankind...’ (Josephine Boyle). R.S. Gwynn’s fine contribution was inspired by a multitude of Johns; from Braine and Wain to Lennon and Dryden. And snapping equally insistently at the heels of the winners were David Silverman, Janet Kenny, Sylvia Fairley, Mark Weeks and Susan McLean, with an uplifting celebration of John Thomas. It’s £25 each to those printed below and the bonus fiver is Basil Ransome-Davies’s.
Milton, Lennon, Keats, Knox, Brown,
Maynard Keynes or JFK?
Many Johns of great renown
(Though they might have feet of clay)
Must deserve a roundelay.
Still and all, my fickle choice
Lights upon John Wayne today.
He of the tobacco voice,
He who growled, ‘The hell you say’
Sure deserves a roundelay.
Always throwing a big chest,
Making bad men back away,
As the conscience of the West
‘Duke’ was more than a cliché
And inspires this roundelay.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Am I the only sucker who will miss his perfect punch?
Here stood a tiny giant, with his grammar in a tangle —
A bruiser from the cruisers who enjoyed a decent lunch,
Before rolling out his tongue to run it through a cranky mangle.
Pause for thought — without him, we would still possess Clause Four:
He was loyal as he could be to his leaders — what endurance!
Okay, he played at croquet, but that’s not against the law.
He also looked like Churchill (that’s the dog that flogs insurance).
He liked a shag, he liked two Jags, he broke the toilet seat,
He had it in for Mandy and for grandees and for spin:
You never had to guess what Johnny Prescott liked to eat —
You only knew he meant it when he took you on the chin.
Oh yes, he was a class act in a team of profiteers,
A demon for the seamen (hence he represented Hull):
He didn’t like academies, had no respect for peers.
Let’s face it, when John’s gone, it will be very drab and dull.
Bill Greenwell
Come, choirs of angels, sing for John
Who helped the nation love what’s gone —
Neat Georgian, bold Victorian,
Tall city spires;
Whose poems’ simple surface finds
An echo in so many kinds
Of generously receptive minds,
Both town and shires;
A poet who could show us how
To love the everyday, the Now.
(They may not like him much in Slough —
To Hell with that!)
May Heaven, for him, have Cornish air
And seaside golf and churches where
The Prayer Book and old hymnals share
A habitat.
D.A. Prince
Lie peaceful, dear Sir John, in your cold tomb;
May these supportive thoughts dispel your gloom!
The King’s insulting words were soon forgot,
‘Fall to thy prayers, old man, I know thee not.’
Your old carousing comrades now are seen
Swaggering and swearing on the public screen.
Your whoring partners, Tearsheat, Mistress Page
And Mistress Quickly, grace the theatre stage,
And your name honours many a London inn.
We praise your girth; we wouldn’t have you thin.
The modern theatregoer loves your riot
And gormandising. They’d impose no diet.
Were you with us today, you’d see a shrink,
Suffer from ASBOs, have to cut the drink.
Lie peaceful — you’re much happier where you are.
Believe me, Sir John Falstaff, you’re a star!
Shirley Curran
Because he’d make a pliant, stop-gap pope,
they voted for Roncalli — whereupon,
when asked his choice of papal name, he plumped,
unpliantly, for the non-grata John.
In 1415, John the twenty-third —
of all the many brutal popes the worst —
was forcibly deposed; since when, his name
(the topmost hitherto for popes) was cursed.
In 1958, Roncalli seized it,
repeating that same number, twenty-three,
so vindicating every decent John
by breaking one bad apple off the tree.
John quickly called the modernising Council;
befriended ‘heretics’ and commies too;
he took some steps to sanction birth control,
though sadly died too soon to see it through.
Barbara Smoker
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