The Illustrated Treasury of Poetry for Children
(i)
You passed on to me your love of poetry
Tucked me up at night and read poems to me
The silly and the playful, the wistful and the heroic
The Jumblies
The Jabberwocky
Ozymandias
and if I pleaded pleasantly
With weeping and with laughter
the story you told of how well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.
You sent me to sleep in a Sieve you did
O frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!
and Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretched far away.
(ii)
I was a fifteen-year-old Thatcher-loving stamp-collecting patriot
Double-maths-physics-chemistry was my chosen A-level fate
I was either going to be a scientist
or be rich
or one day rule the country
It was a summer’s day
and you asked me to walk with you around the garden
and I knew in my bones that this meant
A Talk
either about some major misdemeanour that I was totally unaware of
or about sex
or about God
Whichever way
it was going to be embarrassing
But instead you told me
how much you had enjoyed A-level English at school
and that you could see
how much I loved words
Little did I know
how much that gentle nudge
would totally alter
the course of my life
(iii)
Whenever I sent you one of my poetry collections
I would wince as I posted the package through the mouth of the letterbox
Kill your parents! an older poet once wisely advised
But what if my poetry became the actual murder weapon?
Dad’s heart was dodgy and yours was holy
and my poems could be so fucking rude
often oozed
first sex then drugs
and all that revolutionary psychedelic jazz
I felt like I was fifteen again
and you were just about to discover
the stash of porn mags underneath my adolescent bed
But you replied
that you loved the way I played with language
even though some of the subject matter
was sometimes challenging
(iv)
You are bed-ridden now
These are your final days
Nurses flow in and out of the house
You are my band of angels, you say to them
And in a lucid moment
not too full of drugs or pain
you ask me to read to you
some of those poems again
Oh, the sweet and bitter twist of this:
sitting by your bedside
that very book
this very heart
open so very very wide
(i)
You passed on to me your love of poetry
Tucked me up at night and read poems to me
The silly and the playful, the wistful and the heroic
The Jumblies
The Jabberwocky
Ozymandias
and if I pleaded pleasantly
With weeping and with laughter
the story you told of how well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.
You sent me to sleep in a Sieve you did
O frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!
and Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretched far away.
(ii)
I was a fifteen-year-old Thatcher-loving stamp-collecting patriot
Double-maths-physics-chemistry was my chosen A-level fate
I was either going to be a scientist
or be rich
or one day rule the country
It was a summer’s day
and you asked me to walk with you around the garden
and I knew in my bones that this meant
A Talk
either about some major misdemeanour that I was totally unaware of
or about sex
or about God
Whichever way
it was going to be embarrassing
But instead you told me
how much you had enjoyed A-level English at school
and that you could see
how much I loved words
Little did I know
how much that gentle nudge
would totally alter
the course of my life
(iii)
Whenever I sent you one of my poetry collections
I would wince as I posted the package through the mouth of the letterbox
Kill your parents! an older poet once wisely advised
But what if my poetry became the actual murder weapon?
Dad’s heart was dodgy and yours was holy
and my poems could be so fucking rude
often oozed
first sex then drugs
and all that revolutionary psychedelic jazz
I felt like I was fifteen again
and you were just about to discover
the stash of porn mags underneath my adolescent bed
But you replied
that you loved the way I played with language
even though some of the subject matter
was sometimes challenging
(iv)
You are bed-ridden now
These are your final days
Nurses flow in and out of the house
You are my band of angels, you say to them
And in a lucid moment
not too full of drugs or pain
you ask me to read to you
some of those poems again
Oh, the sweet and bitter twist of this:
sitting by your bedside
that very book
this very heart
open so very very wide
