The Eleventh Day of Christmas

Here people don’t even know what a chav is. Everyone is a chav.There are no posh folk. Unemployment is rife.  ChavTowns website.

Once in
Away in
In the bleak

In a shelter mean and
Cold
Neighbours’ children

Drink a
Drink a
The holly and the
 

Have yourselves a
Deep Pan crisp and
We three:

KINGS!
Wassail
WASSAIL!

Merry ,merry
We all like
We all like

So bring us
And lo
(Lol!)

Westward proceeding
A poor youngling
Come all ye

And deck the
Ding-dong
Let nothing you

We won’t go
Until we’ve got some
And he’s bleeding

On the snow.
Away! Away!
The running of the

Silent
All is calm.
What child?

Lullay.


*Joan Hewitt won the 2003 Northern Promise Poetry award.Her first, late-in-life collection is Missing the Eclipse (Cinnamon). She is a member of the Northern Poetry Workshop, chair Sean O'Brien. Their anthology In Your Own Time arrives in April(Shoestring).

All You Get For Christmas (Is A Caudate Sonnet)

Season of gifts and Brussel Sproutfulness!
The tree is trimmed, the presents all are wrapped –
There’s booze for breakfast (booze all day, in fact),
The kids are so excited, look! Aw, bless…
I watch the family as they try to guess
What’s in those boxes cloaked in stars and tape,
Then Fools and Horses, then The Great Escape.
Do I like Christmas? Sometimes…
                    Maybe…
                           Yes.
So, when I say this, I’m not being perverse –
You may believe these words or you may not;
My gift to you this year will be this verse –
I can’t go spending cash I haven’t got;
‘Cos if I join that retail Push-and-shove,
I might be forced to kill a thing I love.
And, since we don’t believe in God above,
We won’t waste time with “Happy Birthday Jesus”,
But spend our Christmas scoffing lovely cheeses.



*Andy Bennett is a stand-up comedian and a pot-smoking poet. He writes poetry that, two hundred years ago, would have got him rusticated. Andy also likes the word ‘rusticated’.

Setting the Scene

Beggars beg and someone
Blows a tin whistle
For that woman singing softly
To her just-born child
The world does not deserve

Hoping that powerful men
May still wisely kneel
Beside a cradle once again
To know themselves
Through others.