Clerihew: Madonna
Submitted by Janine on
Madonna
Was nearly a goner
When she stepped on a mine
Crossing over the borderline
My Poems
Having written and performed as The Big J in the 1980s, Janine started again in 2014, after a brief interlude of around a quarter of a century.
Froms sonnets to villanelles, limericks to ballads, the occasional rap and plenty of straightforward rants, serious and humorous and sometimes both, here is Janine's verse.
Janine's poems have been published in numerous poetry and other journals and websites, including Algebra of Owls, South Bank Poetry, the Daily Mirror, PUSH, Hour of Writes, Proletarian Poetry, Confluence Medway, Screaming Violets, Poetry24, Solidarity, Stand Up and Spit, Hastings Independent, Freedom, Women’s Fightback, the Morning Star, Rising and TenFootCity; and in anthologies Spies4Life, Poems for Jeremy Corbyn, Justice: Poems for Grenfell Tower.and Ashes to Activists
Clerihew: Laurence Fox
Submitted by Janine on
Laurence Fox
from the school of no knocks
Champion of the overdog
a poundshop Rees Mogg
Going Home by Numbers
Submitted by Janine on
Three Bridges
Seven a.m.
Half moon
Five platforms
No trains
Two queues
Ten replacement buses
Seven leaden workers
Four going in
Three going home
Two more hours
Until forty winks
Clerihew: Rosa Luxemburg
Submitted by Janine on
Rosa Luxemburg
As I'm sure you must have heard
Was jailed and murdered as she would not conform
And preferred revolution to reform
Clerihew: Michael Gove
Submitted by Janine on
Michael Gove
Spun and stitched and wove
A tapestry of policy
Of bloody awful quality
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Photo: Chris McAndrew / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
Clerihew Times Two: Herbert Morrison / Peter Mandelson
Submitted by Janine on
Herbert Morrison
was moderate and worrisome
He had an appropriate grandson:
Peter Mandelson
Peter Mandelson
could not get a handle on
The passionate, radical, principled and quarrelsome:
rather like his grandfather, Herbert Morrison
Clerihew: Emmeline Pankhurst
Submitted by Janine on
Emmeline Pankhurst
among feminists, ranked first
Until she ruined her story
by becoming a Tory
Clerihew: Tony Abbott
Submitted by Janine on
Tony Abbott
jumps like a rabbit
from homophobic bile
to climate change denial
Clerihew: Simon de Montfort
Submitted by Janine on
Simon de Montfort
got off on the wrong foot
He persecuted the Jewish
but won the Battle of Lewes
Blake's Tiger Revisited
Submitted by Janine on
Tiger, tiger, dying out
Shrinking forests no redoubt
Tell the world to stop and see
Its game, its dismal tyranny
In what cruel economy
Agriculture cuts the tree?
Starving our elusive cat
Bulldozing its habitat?
In what fell society
Rising warmness swells the sea?
Drowns the mangroves, floods the land
Whose the profit, whose the hand?
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