Konstandinos’ collection, “The Great Comet of 1996 Foretells” has been short-listed for the 2022 Live Canon poetry collection competition.

Yay! The organisers report that they were “inundated” with competition entries so happy to have got this far. You can see more, plus complete shortlist, here.


Below is my winning poem of the 2017 Poetry Society Stanza Competition on the theme of 'Walls', judged by Andy Croft

Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England

“How,” she muses, “do we keep them out?”
“Mirabilis will know,” pipes up the fool,
a mop-head jokester swamped in crumpled clothes,
“he’s as wizardly in truth as in trickery.”
“Go fetch,” she charges, crossing leathered legs.
Forth he bumbles, north to distant shires,
home to freckled Vikings
and offspring of the Commonwealth,
finds the alchemist hard at work
transforming foaming pottles into piss.
 
Brought before her, the magician marvels,
the automaton he has dreamed of making.
Off come his spectacles, the rhetoric rises,
“May a storming Brexit thunder from its cave,
and dim fair Europe to a dark eclipse.”
He smiles the way daredevil Drake once did
when busting Spain, or cloaking puddles for his Queen.
“Even if ten Boneys reigned in Brussels,
with all the power they command,
they shall not touch a grass of English ground
for I will circle England round with brass,
a shinning wall sprung from your mouth,
command and it shall ring the English strand,
bolder than the slabs that sliced Berlin,
the barricade that stays the Latin tide,
encircling like the mighty ring of Jove
from Dover to the market-place of Rye.”

Then speaks The Head, “Sovereignty” it says.
“Et nunc et semper, amen,” an owlish friar drones
(while taking selfies for his instagram).
A flash of lightning, Big Ben wakes and booms,
a witch swoops in with a frozen leg of lamb,
“This meat is not for turning,” she declares,
and brings it down hard upon The Head – the wall is dead.

Roger Bacon, popularly known as Doctor Mirabilis, was a thirteenth century English philosopher, alchemist and friar; he believed that he could create a magical, mechanical brass head that could conjure up a brass wall that would encircle England and protect her from European influence and incursion. Elizabethan playwright Richard Greene wrote a comedy about Roger Bacon and his brass head – ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’. Text from Greene’s play is the basis of the poem.    

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Judge’s Comments

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Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England is an enjoyably original take on Brexit, somewhat improbably via Roger Bacon. It’s a poem about illusions (‘wizardly’, ‘magician’, ‘marvels’, ‘dreamed’), theatrical gestures (‘cloaking puddles’), boastful nonsense (‘the mighty ring of Jove’) and self-defeating contradictions (the spell designed to stem the ‘Latin tide’ is in Latin, while the ‘England’ that must be defended is of course already home to ‘freckled Vikings’ and ‘the offspring of the Commonwealth’). The combination of nightmare and slapstick, Middle English (‘pottle’) and twenty-first century English (‘taking selfies for his instagram’), reduces the characters in the poem to a cast of
implausible fools and stage-devils in an Elizabethan comedy – Johnson (‘a mop-headed jokester’), May (‘crossing her leathered legs’), Rudd (‘Rye’), Thatcher (‘a witch’) and Rees-Mogg (‘an owlish friar’). A talking head made of ‘brass’ suggests something loud, hollow and brazen (as well as money spent). Meanwhile, the character of Dr Mirabilis (who talks like a tabloid leader-writer) is ‘hard at work’ turning everything he touches to ‘piss’.

Genesis of Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England

First idea for the poem came from listening to a radio programme about 13th century English philosopher and necromancer, Roger Bacon, his ambition to build an automaton which could conjure a brass wall around England to protect it from European incursion, So, a wall and an early Brexiter – the grit and itch. Next I discover Elizabethan playwright Richard Greene’s play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, a freewheeling comedy about Bacon’s automaton. On the afternoon of the competition deadline, I write the poem, a satire about the ghastly Brexiteers, freely based on Greene; staunch Remainer, I revel in the mockery, the poem flows, and off it goes.
 

For further information about the poem and to view the video of the poem visit the Poetry Society.