The Nation’s Favourite Poems Copyright © R J Whiting 2011

Reprinted in ‘97, (eleven times)
Eleven times! And you threw me on the grass;
Nice tarpaulin though, green, mud-veneered
Next to Being Jordan,
A faulty foot-spa
And the third series of Friends (V.H.S.).

Such is the lot for the likes of me
The 'Unwanted Christmas Gift'
Inappropriately given by a cultured friend,
In-Law (some such nondescript)
Forget who, ‘swallowed a dictionary’ type;
He used me once, to prop open a door.

He says, apparently there are poems within
Voted as the Nation’s Favourites;
Billy Elliot’s My Cavity, The Misery Cap
Vidal Sassoon, Nobody Rang
Steven Smith Not Shaving, but Frowning
The Wet Sunday Weedings, by Pop Larkin.

Do not stand at this stall and weep;
Move me into the Sun
Like a Red, Red Rose.
Books are like bloody busses
They stretch in never ending lines
On roadways, and by pavements grey.

Rescued, for fifty pence,
And with a finally broken spine,
My bookmark lover between the sheets;
A consummation.

Poor cousin, library-bound
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

With apologies to T.S. Eliot (Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), Siegfried Sassoon (Everyone Sang), Stevie Smith (Not Waving But Drowning), Phillip Larkin (The Whitsun Weddings), Dylan Thomas (Do Not Go Gently Into That Dark Night), Robert Burns (A Red, Red, Rose), Wilfred Own (Futility), Wendy Cope (Bloody Men), Daffodils (William Wordsworth), W.B. Yeats (The Lake Isle of Innisfree) and Anon (Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep).