PAST TENTS

Like most children, I grew up loving the Circus and, in an age when professional entertainment was less plentiful than today, the 'Big Top' with its sawdust ring, lordly Ringmaster, madcap Clowns, Aerialists, Jugglers and Animal Acts, was a place of awe and wonder that outshone even the cinema. 
Arriving for a show, I’d sometimes spot performers warming up or relaxing amidst the cluster of small tents and caravans that constituted their homes. These colourful individuals had a quality of extraordinariness about them that set them apart from us, their audience: the sort of exotic strangeness that children might imagine a pirate or a highwayman to have.
Trawling through vintage photographs of circus acts from bygone days tends to confirm that early impression.
The photograph below inspired this bit of gentle fun.  


  

HIS CAREER IN THE CIRCUS

He started as The Human Fly:

it was a buzz but he got bored.

He gave sword-swallowing a try

but couldn’t stand the taste of sword.

The High-Wire beckoned: with a shout,

he climbed up there in spangled tights

then hurried down. He had found out

he didn’t have a head for heights.

Billed as The Mighty Cannon-Ball,

it seemed this role was without flaws

but one misfire caused him to fall

into a hungry lion’s jaws.

Inside the fearsome beast’s abdomen,

he took his bow: consummate showman.