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 |  Poems for years 4 and 5 of the Promptly Poetry Challenge. |
| A year's worth of poems, every week for 52 weeks, spanning 2023 and 2024, plus the year following, from August 2024 to August 2025.(provided I live that long, of course). |
 Musicals In a field of crowding buttercups shuttered against the rain she floats like Mary Poppins forgot the plain in Spain. For though the hills may rise and sing her favourite things go spare and carousels go spinning round so fair and unaware. They say the music man was here umbrella to the fore he danced a lot like Oliver and then went off to war. Perhaps I speak of simpler times I’ve lost them all somehow and now our technicolor casts took long ago their bow. Line count: 16 Rhymed abcb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 31 2025 Prompt: As per illustration. |
| Anticipation of Spring Now winter’s snows are shrinking, lace doilies on the lawn, and dark mornings chased away by quickening of the dawn. Now the biting teeth of cold is blunted by the sun and birdsong wakes the swaddled form to hope that winter’s done. Now the mind turns tentative, the lengthened days to count, until the time we say assured we’re over winter’s mount! Line count: 12 Rhymed abcb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 30 2025 Prompt: The anticipation of spring. |
| Ode to February Self effacing, oh Feb, you stand, smallest of the great monthly band, content with the standard weeks four and rarely demand a day more. Though firmly in winter’s cold camp, there’s hope in your briefest of stamps, you might threaten a terrible freeze, but with coming of spring you still tease. Cold and grey as you so often are, there’s good reason to make you a star, while others take forever to run, one blink and February’s done! Line count: 12 Rhymed aabb For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 29 2025 Prompt: Use this title for your poem - Ode to February. |
Poetry 4 Poetry when singing has form bringing a certain even moiety. Perhaps music is gained though truth constrained emotion trained drained. Line count: 8 Form: Quadrette - First four lines word count: 1-2-3-4, first four lines rhyme scheme a-b-b-a, second four lines word count: 4-3-2-1, second four lines rhyme scheme: c-d-d-c For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 28 Prompt: Write a quadrette. |
| Love Shall I compare love to a string of plastic hearts, to a symbol that means anything from lust to martyred sacrifice upon a ritual conflagration, a popular song composed in the fetid heat of some darkened and dishevelled nightclub, a bright young thing gamboling in spring through fields of green and sunlit daisies, a cherished secret hidden beneath the covers of a bedsit flat high up in the towers of the city, a drunken wedding feast lit with flashbulbs and the shrieks of champagne sozzled mirth, a superhero swooping to save from dragons the striking siren of seventeen summers, and daytime dream of dubious darling daughters? No, I’ll turn to your familiar face and knowing look, then smile in our completeness. Line count: 16 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 27 2025 Prompt: Illustration of hearts hanging from the letters of the word love. |
| Nightshift I have seen the nightshift those pale creatures hurrying home before the sun seeking the dark to earn their crust and passing the daylight hours in thickly curtained rooms dozing from fitful dream to dream propping up civilisation with quiet unseen labour leaving the day to louder men who dream of other worlds. I have been the nightshift and hated it missing the sunshine and the prattling crowds somehow surviving the regulation two weeks to return exhausted to the day and meaningless toil. Yes I know the nightshift and give them due honour for they hand on the baton without complaint. Line count: 23 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 26 2025 Prompt: Poet’s choice. |
| Flowers 3 Little dog roses, Tudor in form, lining the trails of my former home, crimson and white and left in the wild, their descendants no longer retiring mild, gone to the city and civilised all, used to the comforts of parlour and hall. Still feral the daisies of forest and field, unchanged in form and simple their yield, doggedly pale and floral exemplar, favourite of children’s drawings forever, untamed and free, still they succeed, dotting the landscape with highlights indeed. But hey to the tulip so brave and so bold, formal and painted so bright from of old, once the key to Netherland’s wealth, driving the trade and that country’s health, now the designer and painter of grace, striped in the fields, the lowlands bright face. Line count: 18 Rhymed aabbcc For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 25 2025 Prompt: Use these words in your poem: roses, daisies, tulips. |
| The Alphabeasts Aardvarks annoyingly act as adults Beavers behave before betraying Chipmunks challenge chilling constraints Diplodocus droops down defeated Earwigs eliminate earnest employees Felines fish for frantic followers Groupers gather ginger garments Hamsters hate heavy hobgoblins Impala imply infinite insurrection Jackals jealously jail jalopies Kingfishers keep kowtowing kings Lobsters like lefthanded loons Manatees may molest ministers Nightingales never needle ninepins Okapis occupy occasional overalls Piranhas prefer prey prostrate Quokka question quiet quail Rhinoceroses retain relaxing resorts Scorpions seldom seem surprised Tarantulas trim their towering threads Urchins use unauthorised utilities Voles value vanished varmints Wildebeest worry wanton walkers X-ray-tetras X-ist X-istentially X-tant Yellowhammers yammer yearly yawning Zebras zap Zambesi zealots. Line count: 26 Form: Alphabestiary For Promptly Poetry Challenge 5, Week 24 Prompt: Write an Alphabestiary poem. |
 Square Peg There is that in us There is That fits not in That somehow we’re an insert From another place In a world of balance Like a bench Placed conveniently by a lake In a forest A sore thumb In a land of nimble fingers A misplaced comma In an eloquent sentence. Not a gross intrusion Or exclamation In a crowded space But an intimation of otherness A hint Of something lost Or not yet found So it’s only now In the quiet places Where silence breathes And thought arrested Finds the slightest wrinkle In the ironed sheet. We are indeed In the world But not of it. Line count: 29 Free verse For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 23 2025 Prompt: As per illustration. |
| Rowan Atkinson Updated No doubt Mr Bean can match grateful, he being an actor sublime - in slapstick he’s really a plateful, in satire he absolute shines. But now he’s entered the arena of political comment sans joke, displaying a side of him meaner and terribly hard on the woke. And in truth I like him the better, as a comic I found him quite crude; his humour seemed childish and wetter, now he looks to be starting a feud. For the audience now is much harder, the lefties impossible to please - there’s no tougher food in the larder, he will wish that he kept them in freeze. Line count: 16 Rhymed abab For Promptly Poetry Challenge 5, Week 22 Prompt: Use the words bean, can, match, grateful. |
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