The Weekly Muse

A pheasant blunders from a hedge

A tractor works the field's edge

As seagulls mob the autumn plough

Winter is preparing now.

A haze hangs late in afternoon

Across the nail-clipping moon

While poetry correspondent, Newell

Stands gazing in a boggy pool.

Our rarest living vertebrates

The pool frogs, Rana lessonae

Are being fixed up with Swedish mates

A spokes-amphibian said, "Wahay!

The chance of pool frogs finding love

Are less than zilch in these parts guv.

The breeding programme needs a shove

Know what I mean? Geddin there bruv."

A species more endangered now

The British farmer, takes his case

To Whitehall, where they view his cow

As info on their database.

And men in charge of crisis coffers

Grudgingly make tiny offers

Never seeing, away from town

The land go wild, as farms close down

Instead they purse their nanny lips

And reaffirm their guardianships

By handing out nutrition tips

To stop our children eating chips

And after seven hundred years

It's time to say goodbye to peers

Those hoary-headed trembling hordes

Who slumber in the House Of Lords

Must now take to ancestral beds

To catch up on their daytime zeds

Shirley Porter, Shirley Porter

Doing what she didn't oughta

Sold the council's bricks and mortar

Moved the dosh across the water

This is fairly sensitive

That's why she's in Tel Aviv

The navy's changed in many ways

Especially since the Hornblower days

Whatever happened to romance?

And who's `Commander Underpants?'

The image cracks. The truth bursts forth

The south is friendlier than the north

This information comes to me

From York, whose university

Has dug itself a great big hole.

With findings of its recent poll

Go south and try our Instant Beer

Y'all come back sometime. Y'hear?