Spectator competition winners: poems that go backwards and forwards

For the latest competition you were asked to compose a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, i.e. from the top down and the bottom up. I worried, as the entries trickled in, that I had set the bar too high, especially given the anguished comments that accompanied some of them. ‘This was one of your really tough assignments,’ wrote one old hand, ‘a combination of mathematics and poetics.’ ‘This challenge almost made me cry,’ wailed another. But I needn’t have worried: your submissions — some palindromic — combined technical adroitness with clever content. High fives to the winners below who are rewarded with £20 each.

Chris O’Carroll What can you show me, mirror on the wall? A rendezvous with my own face? I’ll pass. I never was the fairest of them all. I try to keep my head before the glass. The glass is always full and always not. And this illusion is a quid pro quo.