PLAY
This morning the air is mild and is scented with floral notes.
Alt text suggests this week’s photo is of a person wearing a yellow circle with leaves and acorns on. I can’t really add much to that apart from the fact it is me celebrating the Autumn Wreath that Kath’s Mum made in a craft session recently. I also say that it reminds me of the circles that can be added to profile photos on LinkedIn. I was not one hundred percent sure it was the kind of photo that would typically be shared there, but since it coincided with my Friday celebration of joy that’s where it was destined to go. I even made a couple of new connections there that day.
Playing always puts me in my happy place. So being a poet and knowing that the theme for National Poetry Day this year was ‘Play’ was a gift to me. One year ago, a friend messaged me on National Poetry Day to say they had read a poem of mine to a group of people at a celebration event. I messaged back to say I was delighted and that if they held a similar event I would be very pleased to go along. They didn’t forget, and this year I visited that group of people to read a dozen of my poems. It made my day shine. We also tried out a writing exercise from The Poetry Society which had been produced for the day. It worked well for those who considered themselves to be poets and those who had not done much poetic writing before, and each participant was able to create their own poem during the afternoon.
I had road-tested my set of poems earlier in the year when I read them from a bandstand in a park, and they worked well. This time I was also able to add in Toffee Hammers as the opening poem. It delighted me to have finally finished this poem after many years of wanting to write it but never really coming up with a final draft that said what I wanted to say. It was good to have been spurred on by the theme and by my desire to have a new poem for National Poetry Day. To celebrate the poem’s emergence I chose it for Poem of the Month on my YouTube channel. Sharing poems with a new group of people enabled me to hear the poems afresh and highlighted the joy of having a themed reading. It is refreshing to see how the poems land in different listening spaces, and which ones elicit specific audible responses. I chuckled this time to hear someone say “Oh your poor mum,” in response to the poem which recounts my falling in a pond when I was little.
Here's the poem that has enhanced National Poetry Day for me by being shared in the same space twice:
HIS GUN
for the schoolboy who entered my office without really announcing himself
He shoots.
She is falling,
staggering,
clutching herself.
Her hip seems to disappear.
She stumbles, hits the floor, stills.
He watches,
so silent he stops the air from moving,
her closed eyes flicker to find him.
He searches his words,
they both stare at it hanging from his limp hand.
He meets her gaze, speaks –
It’s just a banana, he tells her.
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