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A collocation of humourous, sometimes controversial, often deeply earnest   writings of a political and philosophical nature hidden under a cloak of impishness




THE GONG FARMER

Nicholas Hancock

Nicholas Hancock was born in Sussex in 1933 but spent most of his youth in a Dickensian school owned by his mother in rural Wiltshire. From his 17th to 19th year he was a  peón or gaucho in Uruguay. After his National Service, he worked, among other things, on a farm, in a shoulder pad factory and on a seiner on the North Sea before  studying at the Sorbonne in 1954-55. In 1989 his novel La Béatification  was published in French Canada. In 1990-91 Nicholas cycled extensively in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, being in Petra for the outbreak of the Gulf War and  meeting his future wife in a Prague pastry shop. In 1998 Phénix published his French poetry in the collection Choses tristes while in the following year the National Poetry  Foundation published some of his English poems in Window for a Monad. His most commercially successful novel:Daniel and Miriam was recently published by Acorn Publications and is available from most bookshops.

                                               
THE GONG FARMER*

Here in this dark pit
beneath the castle wall
a whistling turd goes pat
into the slurry's well.

I wait for the last bit,
turn to the boy Tom Tall.
'Go bang it with your bat:
the shitless hour tell.'

The gong he starts to hit:
they hear it in the hall.
I don my stinking hat,
sink boots in faecal hell.

Right fast I scoop the shit
which might your soul appal;
Tom Short hauls up what's shat
and what the bowels dispel.

I feel, in fumes unfit
for humans, something fall
from heaven, something fat
upon my back. What fell?

Despite the gong, the slit
above expels a squall
of faeces from the slot:
my tongue I fain must quell.

Here in this dark pit
beneath the castle wall
a whistling turd goes pat
upon my hat as well.



* Servant employed by the castle to clean out
the sewage pits below the battlements



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