Words at Play: Writing Poems for My Family


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: 

Spot the math error!

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!


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