In Competition No. 3013 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of August.
There was a whiff of collusion about the entry this week, so many references were there to rubbish television, rubbish weather, fractious kiddies, tired gardens, traffic jams; as Katie Mallett puts it: ‘A turgid time of torpor and delay.’
But there were some sparkling, inventive turns. David Silverman was on pithy form:
Oh, thou cruellest month!
If August comes, then winter
Can’t be far behind.
Honourable mentions also go to A.H. Harker’s well-turned nod to Eliot, to Paul Freeman and to W.J. Webster, a rare but eloquent fan of August. The winners take £30 and John Whitworth pockets £35.
August, August, it’s the tops.
August tastes like lollipops.
August in the midday sun,
Everybody having fun.
Summer days will last for ever.
Girls in cotton dresses go
Up and down and to and fro.
Perfect in their loveliness
Like the girls of Lyonesse,
Free from worry, free from care,
Happy faces everywhere.
All the world is fresh and bright
In that special August light.
Anyway, that’s how it seems.
August is the stuff of dreams.
John Whitworth
Augustus Caesar stole the days, but when his Empire died
the Anglo-Saxon freeman claimed the weeks of Lammastide;
a quiet month, a riot month, when pupils kick their heels
before their bad exam results and up-the-creek appeals;
a hazy month, a lazy month and such as we would see
each time we drove to Kynance Cove along the 303.
We are not fans of caravans, nor statics by the shore,
our kinship dwells in canvas bells that dad pitched in the war;
we push their poles down last year’s holes in bristly thrifted turf,
incant a spell for north-west swell and wild Atlantic surf,
and catch a wave that mermaids crave, as tide begins to run
across the teeth of a granite reef aglow in the August sun.
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