When I set this assignment I was thinking of Pablo Neruda and his odes to subjects as apparently mundane as a lemon, a tomato and ‘a large tuna in the market’.
You didn’t go in for food, but animals featured strongly in the entry, as did buildings — Sixties architecture, in particular. Some strayed into unsavoury territory, musing on pubic hair and other unmentionables. Martin Parker made me smile with his meditation on the marvels of the she-baboon’s bum, which might not be everybody’s cup of tea but is clearly a thing of beauty to the amorous male of the species: ‘So, here’s to the she-baboon’s Technicolor bum,/ and its promise of the amatory action that’s to come…’
Alanna Blake gets £30; the other prizewinners, printed below, £25 each.
It’s not the stripy hair that makes me vexed
Not even with its purples, pinks and greens,
Nor that you look ambiguously sexed
In skimpy vest and torn designer jeans.
Nor yet the scruffy trainers, though their smell
Is redolent of slurry and decay;
These signs that you are yearning to rebel
I can accept are just the teenage way.
But when I see the venom in your eyes,
The way your spittle lands so near my feet,
And hear your callow voice begins to rise
In raw obscenities, then I retreat
Before your clenched fist opens on a blade
And you initiate a needless fight,
Admitting to myself that I’m afraid
When violence and ugliness unite.
Alanna Blake
Hail to the Common Toad,
Greater than Wallum Sedge-Frog,
Let us cherish the Common Toad,
And curse its enemies, grass snake and hedgehog.
Though it be gnarled and warty,
Though it may live till forty,
Yet is it humble, and never haughty,
Therefore, hail to the Common Toad.
What of its orange eyes,
That its pupils are thin black bars?
What that, beneath the seething stars,
Its tongue be sticky with slugs and flies,
That witches appear in its frightful guise?
Though its skin be covered with demon’s drool,
Though its blood be forever cool,
All hail to the Common Toad in its pool.
Bill Greenwell
George Orwell thought they should have knocked it down,
This dream of Gaudi’s dotage, incomplete
And rearing over a delightful town
Like some grotesque dead beast with upturned feet.
Those
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