Palinode

In Competition No. 2795 you were invited to submit a palinode (a poem retracting a previously expressed opinion) on behalf of a well-known poet.
 
We’ve done this before and the results were so impressive I thought we should give it another go. This time round I reluctantly disqualified some extremely funny, well-made poems because they didn’t quite meet the brief. Unlucky losers included Martin Parker, Mae Scanlan, Ray Kelley, John Whitworth and Robert Schechter, whose pithy Bardic about-turn raised a chuckle: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Nah’.
 
Chris O’Carroll takes the extra fiver. The rest earn £30.

Again upon my couch I lay.
My mood was vacant, even pensive.
What blissful inward-eye display
Awaited? I was apprehensive.
 
‘Not daffodils this time!’ I prayed.
But like the Phrygian king of old,
I quickly found myself dismayed
By cloying quantities of gold.
 
This pleasant land has many hues,
With every tint of blossom teems.
Where are my reds, whites, pinks and blues?
Must yellow only haunt my dreams?
 
My dearest wish is that I had
Not praised this stubborn memory.
A poet could not but go mad
In such relentless company.
Chris O’Carroll
 
What made me think I’d never see
A poem lovely as a tree?
 
I’d hardly read a poem then,
Though trees were well within my ken.
 
I lived where trees grew all around,
But hadn’t heard of Ezra Pound.
 
While trees go brown and bare in Fall,
A poem never fades at all,
 
And trees get horrible diseases.
In poems every prospect pleases.
 
Poems are made with wit and flair,
So you can stick trees you-know-where.
G.M. Davis
 
Coward soul, effete and craven, frightened of a
friendly raven
Merely looking for a haven from the arctic storm
outdoor?
Paranoid and sweating rivers, racked by weeping,
sighs and shivers?
Can it be my nervous liver’s yellow as a
beeswaxed floor?
 
Never, but I tell dramatic stories like a fright
fanatic,
Tales of dread from crypt and attic, narratives of
death and gore.
Though a perfect Pollyanna I must fly the Gothic
banner.