Spectator competition winners: poems inspired by the phonetic alphabet

In Competition No. 3210, you were invited to provide a poem or a piece of prose containing words from the phonetic alphabet.

The brief didn’t stipulate that you incorporate all 26 words, but hats off to those who shoehorned them in. In a whopping, wide-ranging entry, with echoes of Keats and MacNeice, and ‘Papa’ Hemingway looming large, Nick Syrett, Nick MacKinnon and Frank Upton shone, but it was a terrific performance all round. The winners earn £30 each.

Why on earth in ’56 did someone rearrange The old phonetic alphabet of 1943, While leaving just four letters of its twenty-six unchanged As Charlie X-ray Mike remained and Victor kept his V? Quebec has now replaced the Queen and Love’s gone down the pan. New Whiskey killed off William while November did for Nan As Easy, Fox and How and Jig were all flushed down the bog With Peter, Uncle, Oboe, Sugar, Item, Tare and Dog; And Able, Baker, Zebra, George were also cancelled then By the random vandalism of some bureaucrat’s red pen Which added some replacements which scarcely augur well Like Yankee Tango Uniform and Zulu Golf Hotel. But I’ve made some recent changes for my private use alone And I warn the perpetrator if I catch him on his own That, on behalf of words to which he gave the coup de grâce, I’ll shove his P-for-Pen right up his K-for-Khyber Pass. Martin Parker

Mike deserved an Oscar for gloominess. His face and the November morning were a uniform grey. Then Jeeves materialised like those johnnies in India on the astral whatsit. ‘The star-crossed lovers, Jeeves.’ ‘Romeo and Juliet, sir?’ ‘Mike and Charlie.’ ‘Sir?’ ‘Aka Charlotte. Papa owns a whisky distillery but doesn’t drink, and a hotel with a dance band but thinks the foxtrot and tango are the devil’s work. And he objects to Mike. He wants an alpha male son-in-law, like Wolfe of Quebec or someone fighting the Zulu at Rorke’s Drift.