Spectator Competition: Bring up the bodies

For Competition 3445 you were invited to provide a sonnet to a previously overlooked body part.In a stellar week – high fives, all round – the £25 John Lewis vouchers are awarded to the authors of those entries printed below and honourable mentions go to Caroline Burke and Mike Greenhough.

Much have I dabbled in the realms of gut

And many goodly small intestines seen,

Worthy of praise in ode or sonnet, but

Excepting Baudelaire’s beloved Spleen,

And many a heart that aches or breaks or worse,

So rarely do we see a fine intestine

Nor colon celebrated in blank verse;

No humble organ do we see expressed in

Rhyme – till now. Behold, the Duodenum!

Gastroscopies have nought to show more fair,

Ah! Happy those endoscopists who’ve seen ’em,

So eat your spleen out, Monsieur Baudelaire!

Replete with glorious enzymes, bile and chyme,

Ne’er saw I such digestive tract sublime!

David Silverman

I don’t recall you, adenoids, at all –

And strictly you’re a mass, not one or two –

A medic cut you out when I was small.

He’d swiped my tonsils, had a peekaboo,

Added you to his swag. He swished his knife,

Casually took you. Something he enjoyed?

I’ve pondered on it all my adult life,

Where you were, adenoids, there is a void.

You would have vanished anyway, say surgeons:

Such pointless body parts (like wisdom teeth)!

You stay like mayflies do. Your brief emergence

Is simply what the long-lost times bequeath.

Apparently, you were some lymphoid tissue –

You’ve gone, but all the same, I rather miss you.

Bill Greenwell

You are my cause of breath, why I respire,

Sweet trachea, main filter of my air,

Entrap mucosa, you who never tire

Of keeping my lungs safe, in good repair,

A graceful bend and flex helps my food through,

Dear cartilage, membranous tube divine,

How I aspire to aspirate with you,

Oh, precious primary conduit of mine,

My wondrous windpipe, vital when I cough,

Ejecting blockages, farewelling phlegm.

Let others mock my passion, shame or scoff,

You are my epithelium-lined gem,

I fear no obstacles, for in the end

There’s nothing that a Heimlich cannot mend.

Janine Beacham

Behold this tube, mankind’s digestive tract,

A marvel of design – relax! Contract!

It moves your food in peristaltic waves

And mostly it complies, and it behaves.

The starting point’s the mouth, the lips that kiss,

They’re paramount for love, for sexual bliss.

The stomach, bile duct, rectum, and the spleen,

These other parts must all remain unseen.

When colons clog things go from bad to worse

For constipation is a wretched curse.

Cocaine and morphine dry you out, it’s said,

And Sherlock used them both. Watson saw red.

Depression loomed. ‘It’s in my chromosomes.’

‘It’s not! It’s alimentary, my dear Holmes!

Elizabeth Kay

There ought to be a sonnet to your bum,

In praise of its curvaceousness and heft.

You disagree and beg me to keep schtum

Yet here one is, affectionate and deft.

The cleft and both your buttocks I revere,

I thrill to feel their warmth beneath my hand

And always want to have them somewhere near.

You turn your back, showing you understand.

Walking away, you complain at my nerve

In praising tautened skin and bulging fat.

I merely pause, thinking about that curve

You wish that exercise had rendered flat.

Gluteus maximus, I’ll sing your praise

Though it can get one cancelled, nowadays.

Adrian Fry

The philtrum separates the lips and nose.

For what? It’s curiously functionless.

No wonder strange mythologies arose

Around its deep mystique of grooviness.

In one an angel, for their own defence,

Will gently seal the mouth of the newborn

Against imparting their omniscience,

The philtrum is the sign that it’s forsworn.

Take it or leave it. It’s a charming tale,

A bedtime story. There’s no pressing need

To view it on a transcendental scale

Or tie it to some superstitious creed.

A philtrum decorates each human face.

Salute the natural and the commonplace.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Our youth in spate, careering through our dawns,

May bear away downstream, and from our gaze,

Appendages we hardly think to mourn,

That yet we will lament in autumn days:

My labial frenulum is long demised,

It died, a scrap of flesh amongst the mud,

With sinister exactitude excised

By punting fly-half’s arcing, slicing, stud.

I spat some blood and hardly marked the loss,

My embouchure was shot, we sold the horn,

But on that pitch, I didn’t give a toss,

And waved away the medicos with scorn.

But now I must face down each new attack,

With upper lip irreparably slack.

Nick Syrett

Dear liver, all these years we’ve rubbed along,

living together fairly peaceably;

never, alas, immortalised in song,

taken for granted, working trouble-free,

left to your own devices. Life’s like that.

The silent body parts are just ignored,

grinding away in darkness, clearing fat

and dodgy stuff out of my blood – and bored

by all this dull routine’s my guess: a rut,

building up stocks of vitamins, and then

fighting infections. Not romantic but

we co-exist, like prayer and soft amen.

This is our contract: you press on within

and on my side I’ll hold back on the gin.

D.A. Prince