On Wednesday July 1st 2009 on Breakfast we are making serious limericks!

Send in your limerick to [email protected] or text 83111 - terms and condtions apply.

You can also send in your entries viaTwitter: 
twitter.com/r3breakfast


Ian McMillan is with us in the studio to make a limerick with listeners.

The limerick is now complete:

It was just the loud tick of the clock
And the dust on her long velvet frock
Built up over years
That brought her to tears
As she gazed at the portrait in shock.


Read suggested lines sent in that didn't make it to the final limerick.

Serious Limericks sent in by listeners:
Read out on air:


From Simon Garrett

Hamlet was a nervy young Dane
Whose visions drove him insane,
His dead father drew near
Talked of poison dripped in his ear;
And in the finale the whole cast was slain.


From BRIAN HISCOE (southwell-Notts)

If it's tough and you're feeling quite sore
If you feel you can't take any more
Then tune in to 3
The best B.B.C.
And let in new hope through the door


Brian Cade

I'm a serious limerick, trying
My best just to stop myself crying.
It's a sign of the times
That my lines and my rhymes
Raise no grins, laughs or smiles, only sighing


From a musical father he came,
Wolfgang A. Mozart his name.
When on top of his form
Took Vienna by storm,
But died, barely a Mark to his name.

Clive Roberts
Bristol


Miss Haversham sat in the gloom
With cobwebs adorning the room
Still dressed as a bride
Rotten flowers at her side
As she glumly awaited her groom

Jennifer Kavanagh

A serious form is the limerick.
It should never be a party trick
Its song is austere.
Its tone is sincere
and its fans abjure all rhetoric.

Duncan McGibbon


Rehearsals can at times be horrendous
Especially the " Missa Solemnis”
At times they are great
when we do Mahler 8
But the Bruckner Motets are stupendous!

Colin Miller


The icecaps are shrinking, we're told,
The planet's becoming less cold -
Ignore admonitions
To cut our emissions
And disaster will surely unfold.

Sally Kettle


the whole world is going to get hot
and mankind will be put on the spot
it may not be the place
for a crass human race
but the insects will like it a lot.

tony robson


“Reduce, re-use, recycle” –
Some say that’s just taking the Michael.
But if we don’t act soon,
We’ll be dead as the moon.
This problem’s as deep as Lake Baikal.

When whingers blame youth of today
The truth they neglect to portray
Is that much-maligned hoodies
May well be the goodies
Who are ready to show us the way.
Anne Jennings (more overleaf)

Baroque music’s great! never dreary;
Often warm, always rich, sometimes eerie.
A consort of viols
Brings the warmest of smiles
To my face when I’m frazzled or weary.


“Heads of blood, rumpled beds - make me retch!
What’s wrong with a nice charcoal sketch?”
But maybe sliced shark
Opens doors to the dark;
And sometimes we need to be stretched.

Anne Jennings

The baby that claws at your face
Put yourself in its place.
God is, at night,
The absence of light
And you touch the edges of space.

Chester Graham

I'm supposed to be writing a sermon. Hence, maybe, the following:

I often feel something to say,
but words always fail to obey.
It seems they're aware:
the principal care
of language is not I but they.

The Rev'd Dr Martin Kitchen

The Two Voices

Our limericks may sound mysterious,
Arrogant, rude or imperious;
Permit us to mention
You must pay attention -
Just listen! We’re trying to be serious!

We don’t like our limericks serious,
To our morning mood so deleterious.
There’s enough that is fearful –
Ask for something more cheerful!
Lots of serious limericks will weary us.
Clive Stott (Bedford)


That prodigy Wolfgang was glad
He received lots of guidance from Dad
In Vienna, his genius excelled
Though from Salzburg he was expelled
But the Radio 3 listener finds his music not bad!

JACQUELYNE MORISON


Heartbreak

She looked in the mirror and cried
How could he have cheated and lied
They’d been together for years
But it was ending in tears
As she wept for the love that had died

John Lipscombe


Total Labyrinthine Failure
Of the trials of my fifty-five years
This new silence in one of my ears
Scares me most, for I know
If the other should go
Ill lose music the worst of my fears.

David Lees


Please look after the hard working bee.
Times are tough for him now, don't you see.
With no bees there's no fruit.
And if flowers follow suit,
there'll be no honey still for tea.

Alison Leah
Solihull



Selection of Serious Limericks sent in by listeners:
Not read out on air:


CEANOTHUS

See patches of mist in soft focus;
See flowers, profuse and precocious;
See cloudlets of blue,
An ethereal view;
See a shrub; see a tree: ceanothus.

Celia Warren


Somme

The lazily meandering stream
Drowsed deep in its midsummer dream.
But then it turned red
From the men who had bled.
Bloody mud. Muddy blood. Silent scream.

Walter Essex,
Hayling Island, Hants.



The fate of the world is unsure
And the policy options obscure
As the ice-caps unfreeze
Spawning wars and disease
Where can poetry find its allure?

Richard Hyman



Mankind liked the warm weather a lot,
Each day was so sunny and hot.
The sea levels rose
As the ice-caps unfroze...
How much more time have we got?

Victoria Anning



A heatwave is forecast, they say
But here in the North-East, NO WAY!
Heavy clouds forming,
Drizzle each day from the morning
(I could grouse about this all the day)

from Moya Steele, avid radio listener who has caught the "Limerick Bug"



Another long day that I gave
to the pointless pursuits that I crave;
another day done
with nothing much won -
another day nearer the grave.

Elisabeth Hopkin



Serious Limerick (revised version)

A poem’s a marvellous way
Of keeping dejection at bay.
You could try something terse,
Just a line, just a verse,
As you shower the cobwebs away.

Serious Limerick (first attempt)

A poem’s a marvellous way
Of keeping dejection at bay.
You could try something terse
As you shower, just one verse,
Or a haiku to start off the day.

David Cobb



A sudden mist this morning
Unfurled without any warning
It pressed on the ground
Leaving grey all around
And melted as the sun was dawning

Don Oldham (Bristol)



For God's sake a limerick must scan
Whatever its topic or plan
However oblique
Its rhythm should speak
Of all that is worthy in man

Ian Rendall



There once was a ship named Titanic
Whose proportions were truly gigantic.
Through faulty design
And an iceberg malign,
It lays to this day in the Atlantic.

David Jenkins




A lady called Sara Mohr Pietsch
(whose tresses have never seen bleach):
On the dullest of days
The music she plays
Makes 3breakfast like sun on the beach.

Leonard Pearcey



Mass surveillance by CCTV
ID cards, DNA - no one's free
Now that privacy's dead
Civil liberties fled
We're all criminal suspects, you see

Jeff



I dreamed in the night that you died
And woke myself up as I cried.
My sorrow was brief
Though I sobbed with relief
When I found you asleep at my side

Virginia Edmunds (York)