Duffy, Carol Ann and Dad

I never studied poetry at school to my recollection - I'm sure I must have done, but it was so lacking in memorableness that it has completely disintegrated from my memory. Being an adult who enjoys poetry, you would assume that the child me would have had some appreciation of the form, but introductions must have always been far duller than the Liverpool transfer news which occupied my infant brain.

At A level, my English course included zero poetry, a sizeable lack in a subject which surely demands that attention be paid to it. Furthermore at university, I was given the freedom to choose the subjects of my choice and other than a tedious reading of William Wordsworth's The Prelude and a dabble into Goblin Market, my experience of poetry was again rare and meaningless to me as focused almost entirely on novels.

And so I became an English teacher without ever having engaged with a single poem. I stood before teenagers doing more learning than effective teaching, but during my three and a bit years of trying to get people to listen to me, I have fallen in love with the beauty of poetry, the wondrous delivery of meaning in short sharp intoxicating phrases. Current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is someone who I have come across because she appears on the syllabus and whilst at times I grapple uncomfortably with her refusal to hide from grimness, she without doubt often writes beautiful and effective stuff. One poem in particular, 'Before You Were Mine', inspired me to pen my own poem. She looked at a photo of her mother before she herself was born and weaved her mother's life onwards from that image. I did the same with a picture of my dad (he's the one that looks a bit like a girl in the picture that heads this blog entry) and this is what came out:

Prickly World

1969 so the back of the picture says,

Vietnam, Woodstock, Harold Wilson and hippies

and I'm not a thought yet, not a blob, not a speck

in your smiling squinting bespectacled eyes.

Long hair was your chosen statement of intent.

A purposefully fought-for freedom fuelled your dreams.

Snug-fitting knitwear was your uniform of choice,

Trying to find yourself in a dark foggy maze.

You were a boy with boy's joys,

adventure scrambling within.

But honey and a sting are a bee-keeper's world.

Alongside the nectary, innocent smile was a prickly world

with prickly truths and a prickle eleven years away called me.

A decade ensured lost to madness, narcotics, oblivion and pain

Until foetus-me knocked on your door and asked for a room.

Nothing you owed me, nothing at all,

Yet you said, 'Come on it, I've room for you in this battered renewed heart.'

I found the biological truth when I was the age of your smile.

I cried because I wanted our blood to be the same,

But what is blood? A red mess on the floor.

What is love? It's what you did when you opened that door.