Spectator Competition: The big move

Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam, Paul Freeman and others, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s final verse seems apt:

It’s hard to read a mind in disrepair

Or one as shiny and airtight as chrome:

Two four-year tenants, signally aware

That an official house is not a home.

The £25 vouchers go to the winners below.

Clean, baby, clean. That place is full of germs

and foreign little microbe-alien things.

I want it pure for all my future terms,

bright as the hope my MAGA-presence brings.

Bleach, baby, bleach. Destroy the nasty stains,

the dirty dirt, their legacy of lies.

They let in Covid – make sure none remains.

Kill anything that looks they might be spies.

Scour, baby, scour. Banish the vermin, rats.

Helluva job but worth the hands-on slog.

Get rid of every trace of Democrats.

Those Bidens! Christ! They even had a dog!

Scrub, baby, scrub – down on your knees for God.

Make sure your Marigolds are good and tight.

Flush every non-American off our sod,

Let’s get the White House super-MAGA white.

D.A. Prince

’Tis the night before Donald, and through the White House

Security staff prowl and gun down a mouse,

Melania’s wardrobe is laid out with care,

With crates of fake tan and a toupee of hair,

New flags deck the office: ‘America First’,

The orders of Biden rescinded, reversed,

Republican colours hang over the beds,

For visions of MAGA-land dance in their heads,

Golf clubs in the hallway and photos of cronies,

Bezos and Zuckerberg, flunkeys and phonies,

Fastness and fortress, the warning signs spread,

For unwanted guests are the things they most dread,

The welcome mat flipped and the armoured guards     standing,

In case of those terrible Sussexes landing,

They’ve tripwired the front door and muffled the bell,

For even the Trumps find them scary as hell.