Spectator competition winners: Dylan Thomas does the ‘Hokey-Cokey’

Jeff Brechlin’s inspired ‘Hokey-Cokey’ rewritten as a Shakespearean sonnet prompted this week’s invitation, to filter the song through the pen of another well-known writer. You were on cracking form this week. Here is a taste of Basil Ransome-Davies as Dorothy Parker:

Oh, I have put my left leg in To join the merry dance, And I have contemplated sin With roisterers in pants.

And I have followed with my right, But sticking to the rules I’ve spurned many a torrid night With gallivanting fools…

And George Simmers’s Seamus Heaney:

Put your left leg in then, its heavy boot so caked with the field’s loam that it’s wide as your father’s. On second thoughts retract it, then repeat the business, marking time, marking your opportunity, keeping possibilities open till the time comes to shake it, as a terrier might a ferret…

Equally enjoyable were reworkings by D.A. Prince, David Silverman and John O’Byrne of Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’ (‘Today we have shaking of parts…’) and Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of My Self-Humiliation’, courtesy of Mark McDonnell.