[Jayne Osborn]

None of us in the Winners’ Enclosure this month, but Hon Menshes to Bazza (and again as G M Davis) and also to Martin. Congratulations, both of you. I must say I enjoyed Nigel Phillips’ If in double rouble trouble…

But once again one of the winning poems is wrongly punctuated (I’ve typed out the page exactly as it appears in the magazine); I mentioned this last time and I think it’s sloppy. Why is it no longer a requirement to present a piece of work in proper English? Ho hum.

Jayne

The Oldie Competition
by Tessa Castro

In Competition No 184 you were invited to write a poem called ‘In the Dark’. I was surprised by the number of axes, daggers and nooses; other favourites were nocturnal anxieties and indigestion. I didn’t realise how well off I was.
Basil Ransome-Davies took a trip to the cinema. G M Davis’s anti-heroine went to hell because she owned up about her affair to her husband. Penny Phillips told her tale through three limericks. Martin Elster constructed an acrostic.
Congratulations to those below, each of whom receives £25, with the bonus prize of a Chambers Biographical Dictionary for the ingenious Nigel Phillips.

In crisis situations I instinctively remark,
‘I need to ask an expert as I’m rather in the dark.’
If I’m swimming in the ocean and I meet a tiger shark,
I’ll radio Chris Packham that I’m deeply in the dark.
If in double rouble trouble with a Russian oligarch,
I’ll contact MI5 and meet discreetly in a park.
If I bungle in the jungle and get kidnapped by the FARC,
I’ll SOS the SAS: ‘Extremely in the dark’.
If called on to distinguish a neutrino from a quark,
I’ll write to Brian Cox and say I’m strangely in the dark.
If pressed on why Americans say clurk instead of clerk,
I’ll phone a phonetician and stay firmly in the dark.
If questioned on the point of rhyming every line with bark
And mark and spark and hark the lark and aardvark, nark and snark
And Noah’s Ark and Cutty Sark and Koo and Freya Stark,
I’ll reply that I’m quite surely, if obscurely, in the dark.
Nigel Phillips

In darkness beats my heart exceeding slow
The clock, unsleeping, taps its metric round
Unbidden come my breaths, and silent go
An hour till dawn, no dreams, no light, no sound
Yet still my mind must race, and run, and churn
Upon the tasks that day alone can bring
And so it never will to sleep return
Till letters come, dogs bark, and doorbells ring.
I start! Was that the bugle’s martial call?
Will I awake to pipes? To battle cry?
No need, it was the thermostat, that’s all
Those pipes they creak a bit and so do I
I must arise, and make some buttered toast
This is, with coffee, what I need the most.
Chris Brew

With Stevens I am in the dark
xxxDespite the light peignoir:
The many blackbirds leave me cold,
xxxLikewise the blue guitar.

I’m in the dark with Ashbery
xxxAnd barely half awake:
The convex portrait seems to me
xxxLike talk for talking’s sake.

‘For all our sakes,’ the poets plead,
xxx‘Don’t ask us what we mean.
We baulk at rhyme, and often find
xxxTransparency obscene.’

Small wonder I am in the dark
xxx– But some old verse can shine
The king sits in Dumferling toune
xxxDrinking the blude-reid wine…
John Robinson

No moon, no silver patterns on the floor,
no line of light along the curtain edge,
no bulb left on downstairs so that the door
admits a crack, no gleam from window-ledge,
no lamp post lighting up the empty street,
no headlights chasing shadows down the wall,
no stand-by gleam; the darkness is complete.
Nothing to lift its suffocating caul.

So no distractions from the inner dark
of doubt and endless questions: life’s big stuff.
It’s 3am but where’s the brilliant spark
lighting the answers: have we got enough
bread for our guests? On Sunday, will it rain?
Where is my passport/ticket for dry cleaning?
What was it Montaigne wrote, exactly? How’s my brain?
And has my tawdry life got any meaning?
D A Prince