Spectator competition winners: Adlestrop revisited (Yes. I remember Germolene…)

The latest challenge, to submit a poem beginning ‘Yes. I remember…’, was suggested by a reader who was very taken with Adrian Bailey’s poem ‘First Love’, a clever riff on Edward Thomas’s much-loved ‘Adlestrop’, published recently in this magazine.

The winners, in an entry that provided a bracing blast of new year nostalgia, earn £25 each.

D.A. Prince
Yes, I remember Germolene —
the densely-pink tinned-salmon hue,
its smell, round tin, unwonted gloss
like warm and antiseptic glue.

It soothed each graze from roller skates.
Those tumbles from the playground swings? —
anaesthetised. It smelt of care,
did Germolene. And other things.

One of the family: its strength
was ways to cure and keep us cleaner,
and one imaginary friend
(my sister’s) was called Germolena.

All through the bumps of growing up
its company has meant we thrive as
the not-too-scarred or wound-marked ones
but truly what we are: survivors.

Chris O’Carroll
Yes. I remember Superman,
Originally called Kal-El,
A hero from another world
Who served Earth’s human family well.