There was a small but jolly set of entries for Competition 68 on a theme which has drawn comments in verse since mid-Victorian times, even Gerard Manley Hopkins referring to Oxford’s ‘base and brickish skirt’. Among the offerings here brick was joined by concrete, solar panels and wind turbines, and builders came in for a bit of a bashing.
With thanks to all who took part, below in no particular order are the lamentations of the seven survivors of judicial sieving.
Julia Griffin: Achers
Today we lament the Lost Acres
Where poets and rabbits once roamed,
Now built on by chancers and fakers,
And people who want to be homed.
Today we lament the Loss-Takers:
The ramblers who cannot forgive,
The squirrels and melody-makers,
And those who need somewhere to live.
Here’s sorrow for all the Low-Stakers
On both sides, unable to pay
For lawyerly movers and shakers
Who'll keep (other) builders away.
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
C.R. Edenhill: Lost Acres
Between the acres of the rye
Was Shakespeare’s line in years gone by,
But acres have become disused
As hectares leave the old bemused
And plots where lovers used to play
Are buried under bricks today.
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
Martin Parker: Fenced In Flows The Ouzel
On either side our river lay
Long fields of barley and of hay.
But, sadly, such sweet rural scenes
Now show on maps as Milton Keynes.
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
D. A. Prince: New Builds
The houses on the flood plain
are new and bright and shiny
with gardens easy to maintain –
concrete and very tiny.
So they'll flood fast when winter rain
fills every soakaway and drain.
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
Alan Millichip: Wasted Acres
These symbols of enlightenment now stand,
On what was once a green and pleasant land;
Acres of solar panels and turbines,
Fighting for space between the power lines.
The first need was to update what was there,
Connecting some renewables with care;
An ideology, not science or fact,
Resulted in this very wanton act.
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
I. V. Neversere: No Sparing Of The Green
(With apologies to A. E.H.)
Though Wenlock Edge lies umbered
And bright still Abdon Burf
What warm between them slumbered,
The smooth green miles of turf,
Like many, York to Dover,
Are short of bloom and blade,
Concreted over
Thanks to the building trade.
♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
Marshall Begel: Scarecrow
I've been at my post for a decade (at most)
to guard these agrarian skies,
where cereal grows, arrayed rows upon rows
to limits of button-sewn eyes.
I may be naive, but it's hard to believe
the pace my dominion recedes.
There's somehow allure in the scent of manure –
Now houses are sprouting like weeds.
They suffer no guilt when their houses are built
on soil that was formerly farmed.
The land that was cast in the pastoral past
deserves to be treasured, not harmed.
Though home building stops the production of crops
the residents doubtlessly need,
my failure with crows unmistakably shows
this straw man defense won't succeed.
