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During 1976 I produced and published in Chichester, West Sussex, England; a bi-monthly ‘free sheet’ tabloid magazine called The City Pilot. In that year there was a poetry competition run by The Chichester Festival Theatre. I entered the following poem but it did not win. I was told afterwards that the jury did not understand it!? It was later published in The City Pilot.

A poem by: Ben Dunk. 1976.

PERISTULON

Herald the way from the seat in Dionysos,

Via ‘Il Piccolo Teatro,’ Pompeii.

Athenum to Noviomagus.

Within Martin’s temple by the fair-sloe-field.                    (NB: Evershed Martin, Founder). I knew Evershed

‘Hexagrammatical’ festivity,                                                for many years from 1944 and helped him in  

filling the sweet, leafy embrace of tree-pure air,                  promoting fund raising for The Chichester Festival

wherein skilled actors mime, dance, play, laugh and cry;    Theatre. In the 1960s I published The Chichester

shout, scream, speak, sigh and sing,                                      Promoter and continued to promote the Theatre

until the steely rafters ring                                                     through that medium.

and flinty-concrete reverberates;

with current messages:     

                                               Oecumenical floods,

                                               bold ‘Elizabethanisms’,

                                               marital cycles

                                               and continental crazes.

Thus, in every passing age,

the playwright’s pen points,

at the paper thin stage

and courageous performers,

rise and fall in perpetuity.