Today’s poem comes courtesy of Ms Johnston.

I am an unashamed fan of silly poems. I grew up in a small farming village in rural Scotland and an annual highlight for me was the village concert, in which villagers young and old would come together to perform music, poems and sketches in our village hall. This would take months of preparation and organisation. Not only did I acquire an unusually extended knowledge of wartime songs for a child of my age, but also a deep love of the likes of Flanders and Swann, Edward Lear and Roald Dahl. One of my very favourite poets, however, was Spike Milligan.

Terence Alan “Spike” Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was a British-Irish actor, comedian, writer, poet and playwright. He was a man of many talents, as revered for his work in theatre and television as for his poetry. A comic genius to the last, at his own request his tombstone bears the Irish inscription ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite’, or in English, ‘I told you I was ill’.

This is one of my very favourite poems he wrote. I hope it will make you smile.

I’ve just been attacked by wild bananas

I’ve just been attacked by wild bananas:
Oh, what shocking awful manas!
As I walked beneath their tree
A bunch of them jumped down on me.
Attacking a defenceless fellow,
As cowards go, they all were yellow.
I was saved when from a tree
There came a hungry chim-pan-zee.
Then, in one great simian dive,
He skinned each one of them alive!
Even then they weren’t quite beaten
Until the last of them was eaten.