Following cancellation of the much-anticipated Primavera Festial this year, organisers today launched instead The CONTRIK-69 Virtual Festival of Arts beginning with a virtual bang by announcing the winner of the 2020 Stay-at-Home Poetry Competition before it had been officially opened.
The judges [Chair Mrs Amanda J Threadbone, but chaired in her absence by deputy Royston Binstocke] has announced the results early and before any entries were received in order to "assure the public that life goes on". The winner Rupert Threadbone Aged 8] was adjudged to have written a poem "So close to doggerel as to be able to smell its bark" but "imbued with a wisdom well in advance of the poet's years and full of sound advice wrapped up in a pleasingly irregular metre". Its model classicist Professor Cicero Tintinabulus said is the heca-deca-iambic-hexameter of the Tuscan type, modified through the lens of the Dorian mode. Hence its "pleasing if occasionally jarring archaism".
It is here reproduced in full. A competition to be advised later in the programme will invite under 7s to set it to music [full orchestra].
ODE TO A VIRUS
by Rupert Threadbone, Batcombe Primary School
When I was a lad my grandmother said
Beware young man of the loonies in the street
Though some's be institutionalised
And some's been near lobotomised
There's plenty out there still.
No - they're not all dead.
They're out there pet,
They're not all locked-up yet
Don't get too set
They're not all locked-up yet
Though she's now long passed grannie's words stay true
But in altered times there's a twist to what she said
Though some's been fully hospitalised
And many more's been traumatised
There's plenty out there still
[Some are carrying the 'flu].
They're out there pet,
They're not all locked-down yet
Don't get too set
They're not all locked-down yet
So the moral of this story, if you care to hear it
Is that nothing helps the nation
More than long self-isolation
Though a great big mess
We can save the NHS
If we all stay in, drinking urine mixed with gin
We can beat this swine
Known as CONTIK-69
Locked up, locked-in, locked down.
Just don't act like a clown
Stay indoors
[You can even clean the floors].
Just don't go out
[The bogey-man's about]
Stay safe, stay secure
[Behind a well-locked door]
Don't risk a fine. Hell - shop on-line.
Order just whatever
[Wait 'til the twelfth of never].
Wash your hands, wash your feet
and we'll have this beat [Really? Ed]
Maybe not before November
So, In the meantime just remember
It's out there pet,
And we're not all locked-down yet
Don't do what you'll regret
'Cause we're not all locked-down yet
Etc. etc.
コメント