Lucy Vickery

Trumpian verse

issue 24 November 2018

In Competition No. 3075 you were invited to submit poems by Donald Trump.
 
The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, which is the brainchild of Rob Sears, represents the fruits of Mr Sears’s efforts to find evidence of the President’s sensitive, poetic side in his tweets and transcripts. The verses in the book are stitched together from Trump’s own words, and promise to reveal ‘a hitherto hidden Donald, who may surprise and delight both students and critics alike’.
 
There were some excellent candidates for volume two in an entry in which haikus were especially popular —‘Terrible! Just found/Obama had my wires tapped./-McCarthyism!’ (John O’Byrne) — and which saw our poet-President draw widely on influences from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Joyce Kilmer (A.R. Duncan Jones: ‘I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovelier than Me’). And there was a spot of Longfellow too. Here’s Joe Houlihan:
 




By the door of Mar-a-Lago,
By his busty model daughter,
With the sun to keep his wig warm,
With the bien pensants all moaning,
MagaWatha bloviated…



The winners earn £30 each.

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