In Competition No. 3259, you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘A(n) [insert county of your choice] Lad’.
There has been quite a fanfare this year to mark the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but rather less attention has been paid to Housman’s Last Poems, also published 100 years ago. Hence this Housman-themed challenge, which attracted a smart and thoughtful entry with some nice Housmanian echoes. George Simmers’s offering also owes a debt to Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen. He and his fellow winners, printed below, take £25 apiece.
You reckon you knew misery In Wenlock and on Bredon, You say the world weren’t good to thee? Well, it gave thee food to feed on. And you’re sad because lads marched to wars, With boots upon their feet? Th’art lucky! We longed for clogs because Of t’broken glass in’t street. Yet every year we heard the lark Sing through the summer’s cold, And through those autumns damp and dark When pies grew thick with mould. We were grim yet happy neath our wan And gloomy Yorkshire skies, And how we loved to feast upon Those blue remembered pies. George Simmers/A Yorkshire Lad
On the stifling, raw M20, Choked with outbound traffic streams, Lads in lorries curse aplenty At the spoiling of their dreams. Eastward, crowded Margate offers Sandy beaches and fine art. All the lucre in its coffers Cannot soothe a baited heart. Laughter of the young men swimming Echoes joys of years long past. Those for whom the light is dimming Feel no comfort at the last. While the nation’s fertile garden, Fructifies in humid heat, Veins and arteries that harden Cue life’s terminal retreat. Basil Ransome-Davies/A Kentish Lad
Where little interrupts the sky, In soil profoundly dark and rich, Fine fields of wheat and barley lie All parcelled out by stream and ditch. Here too the stately Great Ouse flows, Where I first handled rod and reel, And some sly river-spirit chose To let me land a full-grown eel: Tipped out into the old square sink And spurting blood with severed head, It lay awash in ghastly pink, Yet writhed defiantly undead. Long
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