The Girton Poetry Group

Not Averse

A Regrettably Cheesy Discourse

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese

                                          G.K. Chesterton

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

                                          You know who

Transport yourself to the moment when these immortal words spilled from the Shakespearean pen

And flowing across the virginal canvas of the page was the fluid skill of the masterful mage

So with a sigh that page surrendered to the caresses of that pen most famously tender

Forever stained with the Bard’s loving lines, she found herself immortalised.

If Chesterton had been present would he dare suggest that an ode to cheese would have been the best

No, in fact I am sure we all can attest he would have acknowledged mastery with silence

For had cheesy words ravaged the page, then never would they have been engraved

Upon those souls of those modern men who bask in the flames of that revered pen.

Not even Chesterton would find it hard to believe that men can desire more from art that cheese

They want their soul to be gently stroked; they want the fire of their imaginations stoked

Some want the facts as hard and cold, as they very thing cheese! as it is growing old

They want the superb, the surreal, the mundane, a torrent of individuality across the page’s lush terrain,

But never those things that have the amazing audacity to contain nothing more than their visible capacity

So that cheese is not sorely missed from the critically acclaimed world of the immortal rhymists

It would take a poet with supreme imagination to create from cheese an immortal sensation

However, no man has dared to extol, the properties of a property so woefully dull.

Are we not glad it was an epic cause the Greeks and Trojans fought for, instead of finlandia swiss, gubbeen and brin d’amour?

And had Hamlet said ‘Forsooth, I must punish my uncle’s transgression but feta or parmesan now THAT is the question’

Would our souls not be repulsed by the inadequacy of discourses on mozzarella, richelieu and brie

Fixing anyone who disagrees with an impenetrable stare, yes a million times yes I declare!

Thus the sonnets of Shakespeare will forevermore consume, the beings, bodies and souls of any given room

While doomed to perish are humble verses such as this, which misguidedly discuss vieux corse and swiss

Had I not written this I confess with deepest regret, I would banish this rubbish to the first dustbin I met

And the moral of this, as readers will foresee is that passion is the stuff immortality is made on.

Not cheese.