Spectator competition winners: poems back to front, and gutted

The latest challenge asked you to compose a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first line, the new poem being on a different subject from the original. This was a wildly popular comp, which elicited a witty and wide-ranging entry. The effort of extracting six winners from such a palmary bunch meant that I felt more than usually sorry for those who narrowly missed out. Step forward and take a bow, Paul Freeman, Jan Snook, Joseph Conlon, D.A. Prince and James Bench-Capon, who used both ends of the Divine Comedy for a poem about the hell of traffic jams. The winners below, chosen only after much humming and hawing, earn £30 each.

Bill Greenwell I am the captain of my soul: Scant comfort when I’m six feet under Inside a crude and loamy hole. Has someone slipped up here, I wonder?

I thought that I would hob and nob With angels, all their wings aquiver, But I lie, stripped of pulse and throb, Inside some plywood, doomed to shiver.

My soul, it seems, won’t rise or fall, But lodge here with my last remains, Observing thus the free-for-all As maggots chew my senseless brains.

I am condemned.