Category: Poetry

Only four days left

That is, if you fancy your chances of winning the Chariot’s exciting Easter pome competition (or if you just like messing with words).

There are plenty of targets at which to aim your vitriol, I’m sure – or on which to lavish your praises too. From the Tideway Twerp to Shivnarine Chanderpaul, from Assad to Bubba, from Balotelli to Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger. The very stuff of the classic cinquain.

Backside

Alter ego

Never looks back

Can’t avoid his gaze

Pest

Have a guess

Hay-on-Wye is the place of legend, or so it would have us believe. A place for writers and writings, with its annual book festival, mysteriously situated in Powys, Wales but with a postal address in Herefordshire, England (no bull – geddit?).

So have a guess which other mysterious place – somewhere in the world, perhaps at the other end of the rainbow – is ‘twinned’ with Hay? (No googling just yet, p-lease.) Then, if you get it right, you might wonder Wye!

Limerick Grand National – results (Judgement Day)

Yes everybody, the waiting is finally over 😉

Who would have thought it? Perhaps the greatest event of our time.

Almost 80 comments on a competition which until now was heading for the doldrums, a dozen runners, all running fairly, no excessive use of the whip, a good clean race. And the winner is……… Continue reading “Limerick Grand National – results (Judgement Day)”

Horsing around – the penultimate update

One week to go!

Things are hotting up, a welcome late showing by San Francisco Kid, we still have the African stallion and Four Eyes running what appears to be neck and neck out front, with Ol’ Two Face in hot pursuit. It’s time to get those whips out.

(I have a feeling that Ol’ Two Face’s latest entry might just have put one of his noses in front, time will tell)

Continue reading “Horsing around – the penultimate update”

The real ’60s

Allegedly a new Beeb series called White Heat is getting everybody excited about the swingin’ sixties. Danish TV will probably run it in five years or so, so I’ll let you know what I think. But meanwhile the Grauniad has asked some pundits how they have reacted to the show and one in particular has written this:

Roger McGough, poet, b.1937

“We never wore kaftans or put flowers in our hair Never made the hippy trail to San Francisco Our love-ins were a blushing tame affair Friday evenings at the local church hall disco Continue reading “The real ’60s”

Arrows of desire

Luckily for me, St Valentine’s burial in Rome is celebrated on 14th February, which happens to precede my birthday by a couple of days (69, yin yang, nod nod, wink wink, say no more, cheeky!). So every year I get the chance to romance Mrs Janus in good time, to ensure that my birthday will receive the attention it so richly deserves. Yer gotta speculate to accumulate, innit?

But, cherished readers, have you ever wondered what my title is doing in Blake’s famous poem, ‘Jerusalem’?

 File:Eros@Piccadilly.jpg

‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold; Bring me my Arrows of desire……‘ What on earth is the mischievous Eros doing in a hymn? As far as I know, the random or serendipitous demands of lust are not recognised as Christian (or even Roman Catholic) virtues.

Answers, please, on a pink, perfumed blank cheque addressed to yours truly.

February Poetry Comp. – Casabianca

OK, I did not know it was called that either, but after all I’m just a retired techie (right Janus?)

Except for the original, all  the versions I know are “unsuitable for family viewing” as they say here in rural Maryland.

So let us innovate, if you wish you can keep the first line, or if you choose, change it to set the scene elsewhere, but keep the ballad meter and the a-b-a-b rhyming scheme.  Short or long is OK,  the original is an unending twenty verses of Victorian melodrama.

Continue reading “February Poetry Comp. – Casabianca”