In The Poetry

A poem called ‘A Blade of Grass’.

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem.
It is a [...]

I left school when I was fifteen, and when I was fourteen there was this very wonderful teacher who covered his classroom in maps, and he always said when he retired from school, he would go to certain places on these maps. The poem’s called ‘Geography Lesson’

Our teacher told us one day he [...]

Here’s a poem called ‘Blake’s Purest Daughter’, an elegy for Stevie Smith.

Must she always walk with Death, must she?
I went out and asked the sky.
No, it said, no,
She’ll do as I do, as I do.
I go on forever.

Must she always walk with Death, must she?
I went and asked the soil.
No, it said, no,
She’ll do [...]

A hospital in which Mum was dying was very close to a park she used to take me to as a kid, and there’s a big boating lake in the park. A poem called ‘Armada’:

Long long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly [...]

I left school when I was fifteen. It was a secondary modern school called Sefton Park, and now there’s a supermarket where it stood. Just before I left, the careers officer called around to interview the entire school one by one. I think he gave us all about two minutes of his [...]

Sometimes poems that were never intended for children get adopted by them. This next poem is one such poem, and it’s called ‘A Small Dragon’.

I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

I fed it [...]