Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘Bloody men are like bloody rockets’: famous poets on the Apollo 11 moon landing

For the latest competition you were invited to step into the shoes of well-known poets and give their reflections on the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years on. Cath Nichols’s enjoyable entry looked back on the lot of the Apollo wives through Wendy Cope’s acerbic eye. Nick MacKinnon was also an accomplished Cope impersonator:

Bloody men are like bloody rockets, you wait nearly five billion years and as soon as one feels up your craters another Apollo appears…

Rufus Rutherford, channelling Basho, submitted a charming haiku. And Robert Schechter, as Ogden Nash, also kept it brief:

To the marvellous event that happened fifty        years ago I dedicate this ode. The first man on the moon, you say? That was        pretty good, but what I had in mind was              Abbey Road.

The brightest stars this week are printed below and win £25 each.

W.J. Webster/Alexander Pope God’s fiat let there be two kinds of light, One bringing day, the other soft’ning night.

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