Salve For The Savage Breast [And Celebrating Post #750]

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.

A Picture of Dorian Mode.

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.

NB THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. Please do not continue to send in poems - especially of this standard.