Winner.

You may recall the first annual HiR:tb Saskatchewan Roughriders Poetry Contest. We have a winner. The winning entry was submitted by Roland Taylor, curator of the only known collection of the sonnets of Havingevoofer Trauserkov, the noted Russian composer, renaissance man and jack-of-all trades. Trauserkov’s sonnet, penned long before the founding of the CFL, appears to have brilliantly presaged the advent of an adoring green-and-white public dedicated to the football success of the Green Riders:

This Game at large is a mild man’s strategy
To push formed leather and make a score.
The Players battered, no longer fit but sore
We, rising from our soft seats, dream to avoid Tragedy.
In boisterous voice, no cause for Perfidity,
This Game, twelve men on twelve
With scores of threes, sixes and Sevens,
To it, we raise our cheers for good celebration,
A happy joyous roughrider nation.
Our farms with darkest soils give birth
To golden crops are harvested year after year.
And after, in sun and rain, in dark and snow,
We watch, hands clasped, breath held firm by one and all
We cheer, the One who, arms outstretched, catches the ball.

Clearly, as a poet, Trauserkov made one hell of a composer. Born without a sense of smell and with a profoundly impaired sense of direction into a family of itinerant Austrian clowns, Havingevoofer was orphaned at a young age by a disastrous seltzer-bottle accident. Trained as an accountant, he was then engaged through a mixup of forms to work as court composer to a delusional lunatic who believed himself to be the insane King of Germania and who therefore kept his “true” identity (not to mention Trauserkov and his works) jealously concealed. Trauserkov’s works and reputation seem to have largely faded into the mists of history following his death in 1867 at the age of 117 (reputedly from syphilis). A little-known but very loud group of rockers known as the Heroes in Rehab have been the principal force keeping the legacy of the genius Trauserkov alive by championing his works and – from time to time – arranging their own compositions to conform to Trauserkov’s own exacting notions about the relation between the components of musical expression.