Category: Creativity

John Donne

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day
 
Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
         The sun is spent, and now his flasks
         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
                The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar’d with me, who am their epitaph. Continue reading “John Donne”

Poetry Competition – A New Beginning

Theme for the first competition  of 2012 – A New Beginning.

Anything you wish to make of it.  The New Year,  a new home, a new country, a new love, a new bike, upon being released from prison – you get the idea.

To avoid the somnolence which follows the season’s festivities I would like to set the closing at midnight January 10, 2012 (GMT or equivalent) or when the first female contribution is made, whichever is later 🙂

Results of the Revolting Rhymes competition

A good, but short selection of ‘Revolting Rhymes’ for this revival of the poetry competition. Very hard to judge….

Bearsy’s poem (here) was a well told tale of the ‘King’s New Clothes’ with an excellent delayed rhyme scheme and with overtones, to my mind of AA Milne as well and Dahl!

Low Wattage gave us a new version of ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ (here) capturing their grief after the wedding excellently, with a couple of ‘in-house’ references, cleverly placed!

Janus made an excellent go of ‘The Tin Soldier’ (here) – though from the comments I read afterwards he had to sort out formatting and do a little post-post- editing, helped in the end by Bearsy! I hate that stanza thing disappearing when pasting in from word! What’s the answer, Old Bear?

John Mackie’s contribution tells the tale of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (here) with a lovely twist – the addition of Stockholm Syndrome!!! Hilarious.

After thought and consideration I hereby nominate Low Wattage as the winner this time and hand the honour of setting the next competition to him.

The Gray Ghost – December CW Comp.

It was just after midnight on the night of December 24th 1936.

The steel-hulled square-rigged ship “Caspar” 140 days out of Callao, beyond Cape Horn, with 3,500 tons of nitrate fertilizer in her holds, was just into the English Channel. Her destination and homeport was the town of Ipswich, now less than 200 miles away. The weather in the channel was bad and getting worse. In heavy snow, driven by gale force winds out of the East, the big sailing ship was fighting for every inch of windward progress she could make and had tacked to the northward far over by Guernsey Island in an attempt to get beyond Start Point and buy a little extra room to make better eastward progress.
Continue reading “The Gray Ghost – December CW Comp.”

My Daily Walk [December CWC]

I picked myself up and turned back to see what had tripped me.

Someone was lying face-down in the middle of the footpath, arms loosely at his side, one leg sprawled sideways.   There was blood seeping from his head; he was very still.   How could I have missed seeing him, I wondered?   Sure, I had been thinking about what to cook for dinner while I listened to triple-M, but to be unaware of something as large as a body suggested gross inattention.   I knelt to see if I could render assistance, but the poor chap looked as though he was past all help.   Continue reading “My Daily Walk [December CWC]”