Lucy Vickery resents this week’s competition
In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas.
The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else.
Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas!
Turkey gizzard, and a blizzard
Blasting through the bright arcade
(Cliff and Slade and Mud and Wizzard,
The usual claptrap, loudly played):
How I wish I had a hatchet —
Cut the lights and let the dark in,
Chop the tree and stifle Cratchit.
Christmas feeds my inner Larkin.
Season’s knees-ups, Christmas ceilidhs,
Greater greed than pigs in sties,
Pensioners on double Baileys,
Gorging gaily on mince pies:
Each December grows unpleasant
And, before its tide’s receded,
There is one thought ever-present:
Where is Herod when he’s needed?
Bill Greenwell
Cursed be the candles, the crackers, the cake.
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