Spectator competition winners: Ode on a potato peeler

The idea for the latest challenge, to submit a poem about a domestic object, came to me when reading about an exhibition at the University of Hull (until 1 October) of Philip Larkin’s personal possessions. Alongside books, records, a pair of knickers and a figurine of Hitler is the lawnmower that inspired the poem ‘The Mower’, which he wrote in the summer of 1979 after inadvertently killing a hedgehog while cutting the grass. According to Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s secretary and one-time lover, he told her about the incident ‘…in his office the following morning with tears streaming down his face’. Your poems made me smile rather than cry: this was another popular comp that drew an entry packed with wit and inventiveness. Alanna Blake, Nathan Weston and Mae Scanlan stood out, and the winners, below, take £25 each. Chris O’Carroll

O simple implement, no shrewd machine,

No moving parts — just handle wed to bowl.

Armed with no more, we face the great unseen

And trust in one spoonful to taste the whole.

 

A curve as casual as bone or bough,

The grace of flesh in sleek metallic lines.

How minuscule each captured taste, and how

Immense the cosmos one spoonful defines.

 

Stirring a bright or bitter morning cup,

We thrive on rich, far scents of bean and leaf,

The whiff of essence one spoonful lifts up

Modest as time is vast and life is brief.

 

That we may prize the small, attentive taste,

Stay by us, prized utensil, night and noon.

That we may let no flavour go to waste,

Uphold our lives with your light lift, O spoon.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Wallace Stevens had a jar,

Eliot coffee spoons,

Each of them a superstar

At writing loony tunes.

 

The commoner the household thing,

The more abstruse the thought.

The reader is left puzzling,

And more than somewhat fraught.

 

I have a...