Last month I noticed that the only poem I’ve ever written was a suitable candidate for the local literary festival’s poetry competition, whose theme had been announced as ‘landscape as muse’. So I dug it out of the drawer and had another look at it.
I thought the poem excellent. One of the competition rules was that each entry must have a title, however, and mine was untitled, so I sat down to think of one. After some thought, I gave it the title: ‘Snapshot of my eight-year-old son and Mr Allen standing on a hillside above a bay in early autumn waiting for the albino ferret Fatima to come out of the rabbit hole’. We’d been waiting for Fatima to come out, and my boy and Mr Allen had been standing together a little way away from where I was and admiring the view. Tiny cries of gulls and happy holidaymakers were drifting up from the curving sands below. Mr Allen hadn’t long to live, and knew it, and my boy seemed brand new, and I’d made a poem about that moment.
But it was a bit of a mouthful, I realised, and nearly as long as the poem, so I changed it to ‘A lie up’, which is the technical term for what happens when, instead of busily rousting the rabbits out of their homes and chasing them into the hemp nets you’ve carefully laid at the burrow entrances, your ferret eats one and takes an afternoon nap beside the carcass.
As a title, ‘A lie up’ was a masterstroke, I thought, as I slid the poem and the £4 postal order into the envelope. The prize was as good as in the bag. Before sealing the envelope I took the poem out for one last loving look, noticed three extraneous adjectives and neatly struck them out, then I trotted up to the post office to send it off.
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