COMPETITION

Christmas travel

Jaspistos

IN COMPETITION NO. 2065 you were asked for a poem in which one of the three Wise Men, or Kings, describes the trip to Bethlehem.

We three Kings of Orient are, One in a taxi, one in a car, One on a scooter,

Blowing his hooter, Smoking a rubber cigar.

So sang the young rascals at my son's last school. Yet all boys, I suspect, covet the royal parts in the Nativity play — you can glitter and look grand and be dignifiedly generous. This was a good seasonable comp, encompassing all moods from merry to melancholy. Commendations to Ray Kelley, Martin Woodhead, M.R. Dunmore, Alanna Blake and Frank McDonald. The prizewinners, printed below, take £25 each, and the bottle of The Macallan The Malt Scotch whisky (first-rate stuff which I was privileged to enjoy last week) belongs to John E. Cunningham, whose reference to Cologne reminds us that that is where the Kings are reputedly buried.

A cool leaving we had of it, The women in arms, having no representation, Despite our striving for ethnic correctness. Much good it did us! Balthasar Banged on and on about those Hanging Gardens, Melchior sighed for the Ethiopian sunshine.

Still, if the stars say it's now or never, It's now.

The kid was OK, and the parents Seemed touched by the gifts we had guarded so well from bandits; But as soon as I'd paid off the porters - Excessively — I set out on my own To look at Cologne, which I've always fancied, So far as our wisdom would let me, As my spiritual home. (John E. Cunningham) The desert put us all in our places.

By night Ten thousand frozen stars ignored us.

By day

The sun kept its own counsel,

Indifferent rocks cracked in the heat, Mirages danced for themselves alone.

As we walked Wind from the beginning of time Wiped out our footprints.

At dusk yesterday A sand-cat killed and ate a viper Two yards from me, as if I was nothing.

And this baby, Lord of all Mankind?

Kings don't count for much here.

(Michael Swan) Hybridisation makes the mule A sterile and a stubborn beast. Chaldea, where the planets rule, Had not prepared me in the least For camels, whose ungainly sway And sudden, renal-jarring thrust Afflict the learned and the lay: We bore it, as the destined must, We bore it till, at every jar,

Our pampered bones screamed at the pace—

We cursed the pestilential star.

Suddenly stumbling on the place, We kicked aside the crazy door, And saw; and heard the Infant's cry. Then science was replaced by awe, Mathematics was a well run dry.

(Alyson Nikiteas) Imagine this, you who have charts and maps, guidebooks and satellites to plot your routes, experts, advisers on the many traps gaping for travellers, phrasebooks in the flutes and trills of foreign tongues, rates of exchange, inoculations to preserve your health, search parties should you vanish out of range, consuls to bring you home, sponsors with wealth, websites to show you how, the tourist boards eager to smooth your path, global TV, insurance policies, the package hordes lured by the brochures' bland security Imagine this: we did not know how far, or where, what tongue, what cost, what ills, what wraith of madness was attendant on that star. But still we journeyed on: an act of faith.

(D.A. Prince) Camels 'gilled, sore-footed, refractory'? My beast was never so satisfactory, A knock-kneed freak even in that race of freaks, A bastard camel bought from bastard Greeks. That first evening, as we climbed from the gentle valley floor, He belched his resonant declaration of war, Then kicked and bit and stalled, exhausting every stratagem, Down the dusty roads, through olive groves, to Bethlehem.

A prince cannot ride a mule or a moke, And so I swayed away the days upon my lurching, standing joke.

I. never saw the star grow vast and still,

Nor knew the journey over. Instead I drank my

fill And sat scowling in the inn until pulled from my chair To see my camel kneeling by a stable, watchful, silent there.

I have him still, sullen by my door, For where I saw a child, I think that he saw more.

(Nick Syrett)