Poetry is contagious. I caught the bug from my children. When they were little, they inhabited a technicolour sonic-world of rhythm and rhyme. Verse was their native tongue.
“Yummy, Scrummy, in my tummy!” my son exclaimed one day, before tucking into a plate of beans.
The words buzzed around inside me, and a few hours later, I had written him my first poem:
Yumptious, Scrumptious
In my lunch-ous
A harrumptious
Treat from mum-chus
Hmmm . . . my tumcious
Sure feels grumptious
I’ll sit on my bumptious rumptious
And have me a crunch’n’munch-us
Every since, writing poems for my family has helped me keep life playful – no matter how serious the topic. One evening, at dinner, my husband and son discoursed at length about the Fibonacci sequence Al was studying in school. Each number in the sequence 0-1-1-2-3-5-8[…] represents the sum of the prior two, producing a pattern that is embedded throughout nature’s architecture, from branching in trees to the spiral arrangement of seeds at the center of a sunflower.
The next morning, I left this on my husband’s desk:
Sometimes, it’s the physical form of the words on the page that enchants me. After the birth of my daughter, I became obsessed with sketching our names as a visual poem, making the ‘U’ in ‘Mum” into arms that cradled the letters of her name:
Does playful mean superficial? Quite the contrary. We humans express our deepest joys, desires and fears through play. I was brought to tears when I wrote a song for my children, adapting Anyone Else but You by the Moldy Peaches, because the final stanza allowed me to express my visceral desire to round out our family with a second child:
I thought of you, I cried for you, I’d sing for you, I yearned for you.
Because I knew that if I tried, there’s everything to learn from you.
I don’t know how we’d ever thought we’d be a family at all,
Without you.
The greats wrote poems about love to conquer and subdue it. My goal – more modest, or perhaps, altogether more ambitious – is quite simply to experience it more fully, so that somehow, the intensely solitary act of writing leaves me feeling more deeply connected to those I love. A love poem may be a gift, but the love it strengthens is a gift the writer gets to keep.
Valentine’s Day is on its way. Does someone in your life need a love poem?
Join me for a Poetry Workshop, Saturday, February 5, 2022, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., at the idyllic Fisherwood Farm in East Sussex.
Alpacas, Scones and Poetry, Oh my!
No comments yet.