The Poetry Barn wasn’t really a barn
It was merely an old farm house,
It sat on the acres of Eddington’s Farm,
Surrounded by sheep and by cows.
But Poets came over from Stuttersby Dell,
Drove over from Scatabout Wood,
To write in the air of the Poetry Barn
About things, when they ought and they should.

They came from Great Orton, they came from Rams Well,
They came from Glenn Wheatley and Grey,
The best and the worst of the poets you’d find
At the Poetry Barn, every day,
The rooms had been empty for many a year
So they all sat on bundles of straw,
And when they ran out they would send up a shout,
So some would go out and get more.

The mornings would see all the Elegies worked,
The Epics, the Odes and Quatrains,
The Poetry Barn would then grumble and groan
As the Dirges would enter the drains.
By noon the fair Sonnets came into their own
With just the odd wanton Lament,
When poets would seek out the culprit to find
One grinding his verse in a tent.

By evening they’d work on the Pastoral,
The Sestet, the Roundel as well,
And those at a loss after losing the toss
Would be stuck with the old Villanelle,
They’d all settle down when the Moon came up round,
And the stars twinkled boldly in rhyme,
When one asked the other, ‘pray, what rhymes with brother,’
And he’d say, ‘your Mom, all the time.’

The poems would stick to the inside walls,
Would tear at each other like knaves,
They’d fill up the aisles and lie flat on the tiles
And would damage the old architraves.
At night you could hear all the horses hooves
As they carried the good news to Aix,
And in came the wedding guest, him with the albatross
Counting his many mistakes.

I saw that they’d burned down the Poetry Barn
With one sad, incendiary rhyme,
A poet called Glover who wrote to his lover
‘My candle, you light all the time.’
The straw caught alight in his lover’s delight
And they fled from that bastion of verse,
I just penned this missal for someone to whistle,
The one that he’d written was worse.

David Lewis Paget