Competition 3435 invited you to write a poem that included Wendy Cope’s immortal line ‘A happier cabbage you never did see’, from ‘Being Boring’. This was a popular competition with more entries than usual (it’s always a mystery) and you grappled heroically with the challenge of making cabbage interesting. A mention must go to Janine Beacham for her opening lines about another brassica:
O fat white cauliflower few can love,
Why do you taste like an oven glove?
Cheese sauce helps, but Lord above,
Your flavour’s not up to much.
Too many runners up to name names but here are the winners of the £25 vouchers.
Edgily-veggiely
Brassicaracea –
A happier cabbage you
Never did see.
Nature in harmony,
Interdependently,
Anthropomorphic –
The cabbage is me.
Cattery-pillary
Flighty Fritillary,
Love lepidopteran
Flutters round me.
Laying her eggs on me,
Stretching her legs on me –
Entomological
Air b and b.
David Silverman
Retired to his garden, Candide showed to me
The happiest cabbage you ever did see,
He’d sown it and grown it with exquisite flair,
And told me none finer were known anywhere.
It was green, it was leafy, its nested heart pale,
The smell it exuded struck earthy and hale,
He petted it, fetished it, called it by name,
Advised me to try growing one just the same.
The sheen of his cabbage, its intricate veins
Betrayed all the love he’d put in it, the pains
He’d taken at bending and tending his veg;
Its squeaky-fresh texture set my teeth on edge.
Retired to my garden, a chaos of weed,
Staring hard at the cabbage I stole from Candide,
I’m jealous and zealously go with a whoop
Back into the kitchen to boil it in soup.
Adrian Fry
A happier cabbage you never did see
Than the taste-bomb they gave me in Trincomalee,
With mustard-seeds bursting the length of my tongue
In a dish they prepared me called cabbage mallung:
Coconut, cumin, turmeric and lime –
And curry leaves, onion – sliced in its prime –
But the star of the show, if I may be bold and
Declare it? That cabbage, glistening golden,
As jolly as sandboys, and quite without rancour –
That cabbage that cheered from the north of Sri Lanka.
Not for this beauty a cold-hearted slaw,
Or the flatulent sog by the dining-hall door
Where the underpaid cooks took the cabbage to massacre
(As they did every poor helpless species of brassica).
Sauerkraut? No sir, nor rumbledethumps:
Only my mallung brings cabbage up trumps!
Bill Greenwell
‘A happier cabbage you never did see!’
But with veg, as with humans, appearance deceives,
And a desperate urge to uproot and break free
Smouldered beneath those innocuous leaves.
For this cabbage dreamt of far distant places
Beyond its plain earth and stern wooden fences;
A world of new sights, new sounds and new faces,
Of adventure, enchantment, exalting the senses!
It cursed its position, held firm by the soil;
Feared, one day soon, ignominious fate.
Heard grim local rumours that made its heart boil:
The kitchen, the knife, the pot, then the plate.
Martin Brown
A happier cabbage you never did see;
It beats all the carrots and cucumbers, too;
It smirks like a lettuce all covered in brie;
It fluffs out its wings like a proud cockatoo!
So why is it happy and why is it glad,
And why is it wafting a perfume like sprout?
The life of a cabbage is boiling and sad:
A dip in a pan and a trip to a snout!
The reason is simple; the reason won’t wait;
This cabbage is chosen for stardom, it’s true:
It’s off to Korea in luxury crate,
To transform to kimchi in vinegar brew!
And then there’ll be years in a beautiful fridge,
And fame on the talk-shows assessing its weight,
Its texture, its sweetness, its health-giving traits:
O cabbage! O kimchi! O glorious fate!
Nicholas Lee
A happier cabbage you never did see
Than the King of the Brassicas
In allotment fourteen, bed number three.
His comfortable throne had been thoroughly dug
And weeded and fed with all the right stuff
’Til the cabbage grew huge and insufferably smug.
‘Look at my heart, so much greater than yours,
And my outer leaves big as umbrellas
That could shelter a picnic if ever it pours.’
So bragged the mighty and arrogant veg
To the cauliflowers, broad beans, lettuce and sprouts
And even the dandelions, couch grass and sedge.
Then one bright sunny morning, oh woe, woe is me:
The cabbage was shredded to barely a stalk,
But a happier caterpillar you never did see.
Joseph Houlihan
No. 3438: Hope stings
‘It’s not the despair… I can stand the despair. It’s the hope.’ (A quote from the 1980s classic Clockwise.) You’re invited to submit a passage or poem on this theme (16 lines/150 words max). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 18 February.
Comments