Food for thought

In Competition No. 2419 you were invited to supply a poem in free verse beginning ‘I think continually of …’

‘…those who were truly great’ completes the first line of a much anthologised poem by Stephen Spender. Free verse has a tendency to slip into something like very rough blank verse, and some of you fell into this trap. Of all the things continually thought about by you I was especially tickled by Paul Griffin’s ‘the Saturday Collectors,/ Mrs Broadworthy, Mr Brisk, and the sisters Payne,/ Always the same four’. The prizewinners, printed below, take £25, and I have no hesitation in awarding the bonus fiver to Noel Petty.

I think continually of sex.
Every six minutes, they say,
the clever ones who know such things,
or is it perhaps six seconds? I forget.
I try sometimes to test this theory,
creeping up on myself
to catch me unawares,
but always I see me coming
and gaze at the sky
whistling, in a pantomime of innocence.