< Vera >

by Jack Cooper

We’ll meet again
Don’t know where, don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again
some sunny day.
Keep smiling through,
just like you always do,
‘Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds
far away

So will you please say hello
to the folks that I know
tell them I won’t be long.
they’ll be happy to know
That as you saw me go,
I was singing this song

We’ll meet again
Don’t know where, don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again

Words taken in the order of the Fibonacci sequence from We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn.

This poem is commended in the Bletchley Park poetry challenge on Young Poets Network (YPN).

So Mayer, who wrote and judged the challenge, said that of this poem, “Very clever indeed: using the Fibonacci sequence as a generative constraint to uncover a haunting poem encoded, like a secret love letter, in ‘We’ll Meet Again.’ Gets the reader listening carefully for further secret codes!”

Jack Cooper

Jack is the first-prize winner of the second Bloodaxe Archive challenge on Young Poets Network, about White Space. He is the second-prize winner of the Ode to (Small) Joy challenge, and the third-prize winner of the Carol Ann Duffy challenge and the nonsense poetry challenge. Jack is commended in August Challenge #2: Write the Absurd, set and judged by Foyle Young Poet Mukisa Verrall; in the Young Poets Network 10th anniversary challenge, Gboyega Odubanjo's People Need Nature challenge, the Climate Crisis and You challenge, the Bletchley Park challenge, the moon poetry challenge, the Mary Wollstonecraft challenge, the Timothy Corsellis Prize 2019 and August Challenge #3 on meta-poetry.