Snakes

I don’t mind snakes
but sometimes
they’ve been quite

you know: snakes
going up legs
and snakes everywhere
warm on your skin

lots of snakes
like giant white albino pythons
I don’t mind them
so it’s all right

I don’t mind them
I quite like them
but yeah
if you didn’t I mean

Taken from an interview with Kate Moss in The Times, 26th January 2012. The interviewer’s questions and some punctuation removed. Submitted by Thom.

Simon and Ruth

At first, Ruth was a bit put off
by the fact that Simon turned up in a car
with every imaginable gadget:
I wasn’t used to flash cars, she says.

Then, on a day out to the beach,
Simon messed up Ruth’s kite.
He got all the lines tangled
so I didn’t use it again, says Ruth,

who had, however, noticed
that Simon was very polite.

Taken from the Announcements, Marriages and Engagements section of The Times on 18 February 2012 (Simon and Ruth are to be married on 22 June 2012). Submitted by Thom.

Autobahn

A motorway in Germany was closed
for hours as emergency crews
scraped frozen sauerkraut
off the road.

The pickled cabbage had spilt
from a lorry involved in a crash
near Frankfurt, freezing immediately
in the cold conditions.

A news story from the ‘Weird but Wonderful’ section of the Sunday Times, 12th February 2012. Submitted by Thom.

Here

There is still snow on the trees; it is that kind of snow.
One sees it out of the windows here
like some extraordinary garden.
It is the kind of snowfall about which girls write verse.

There is an uncommon silence
when I walk Federico to the school bus.
The light is eclipsed and lovely.
One wants to see it all so clearly.

From a journal entry by John Cheever in 1968. The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage Classics, 2010, first pub. 1991), p. 244. Submitted by Thom.