TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 222 you were invited to write a poem called ‘Knees’. ‘I thought life was all about knowing / Till I knew it was just about knees,’ wrote C D L Wilson. ‘How knobbly are your knees, / On a scale of one to ten?’ asked Rosemary Ostley. Jon Askew’s Mcgonagallesque conclusion was: ‘The only way to delay a calamity / Is with frequent application of an anti-inflammatory.’ Alan Lewis summed it up: ‘Knees creak. / Muscle’s weak. / Sphincters leak. / Future’s bleak.’ Commiserations to these and more, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of a Chambers Biographical Dictionary going to Ken Turner.
As nimble nimbus would I dance Beside the lake, beneath the trees, But nowadays I have no chance – I’m such a martyr to my knees. They crepitate and moan and creak, And I’m left standing, old and weak.
So tell us, Bill, when couched you lay, ‘in vacant or in pensive mood’, Did you foreknow that awful day When aged bones’ decrepitude Would make you change those lyric glees To lamentations owed to knees? Ken Turner
There he sits, arm on knee, Thinking away the years Since Rodin carved him with such skill Unfeeling, it appears. But were that statue flesh and blood I doubt that it would be Unmoved, unmoving, as the strain Would cause it agony.
I’ve tried this pose, but can affirm It does not help in thought. My back would soon protest against The angle of support. If I were carving out a form To show a thinker’s pose, I’d put both elbows on the knees, With hands round chin to nose. Katie Mallett
I’m on a bus, drenched with the weather, And see you running hell-for-leather. You grab the pole and swing aboard, White teeth and laughing eyes. Sweet Lord,
Your golden summer scents the breeze, I am enamoured of your knees. Whoever loved who loved not at First sight? I saw and that was that.
I kissed your grinful, sinful mouth, Your East, your West, your North, your South, So supercharged and superfine, And so miraculously mine.
The years, they slip away like thieves, Deciduous as autumn leaves. I see those knees. I see them yet, And the bald street all shining wet. John Whitworth
When miniskirts were new, someone wrote to confess A strange feeling in a letter to the press. The writer was, I think, artless and sincere: ‘When I see the backs of women’s knees, I hear The Pastoral Symphony.’
People jeered. He was eccentric or a creep. No, I thought, but didn’t say: a dreamer, deep In love behind a cluttered desk, whose words reveal The yearning of a tired clerk; and so I feel A kind of sympathy.
A milkmaid with her skirt tucked up above her knees Rises. From the doorway, it’s her back he sees. She turns and smiles at him, and arm-in-arm they go And lie together in the ripening field… or so It seems to him and me. Roger Rengold
Competition No 224 There’s plenty around, so a poem, please, called ‘In the Dark’. Maximum 16 lines. Entries by post (The Oldie, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA) or email (comps@theoldie. co.uk – include your postal address) to ‘Competition No 224’ by 4th January.