Tag Archives: education

The best years of our lives

Leave a reply

To celebrate my friend Kathleen Kummer’s 94th birthday, here is a poem from her debut collection Living below sea level. Poems from the book have featured on the blog before. The cover image is by Shirley Smith, Society of Wood Engravers.

Kathleen’s father was a coal miner. She went to Cambridge to study Modern Languages. She met and married a Dutchman. For several years Kathleen taught French and German at an International School in The Netherlands.

Happy Birthday, Kathleen: Van harte gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag.

The best years of our lives

Passing under the neo-Gothic
redbrick arch, the original bluestockings?
Not quite, but close enough to be given
the run of the Fellows’ drawing room
to sip our pre-prandial sherry, held
in hands we remembered curled for warmth
round mugs of cocoa. The cold tiles loud
with echoes, we followed the murky passage
to Hall, the swimming-pool’s proximity
still worrying, potent with the imagined
smell of bleach. The dinner was,
as expected, reassuringly bad;
the rooms were bleak, the unfamiliar
duvets thin, cot-sized; resilience
was needed for the nocturnal trek to the bathroom.
But none of this detracted one jot
from the utter, heartfelt certainty
that those had been the best years of our lives.

Taking other routes – a poem

Leave a reply
Rock church, Lalibela – Heiss via Pixabay

With my birthday coming up, I am posting a poem that celebrates key experiences in my life. These include visiting Lalibela in Ethiopia in 2007, travelling with the friend who set up the Lalibela Educational Trust, to meet the boy I sponsored and his widowed mother. My parents – a church organist father and semi-professional singing mother – did pass on the creative gene, for sure.

Thank you for liking these posts and for following my blog!

St Mark’s Venice – Hermann via Pixabay

Taking other routes

My parents never taught me to swim; didn’t take me skating
on those Christmas-card frozen canals. I have never
been famous, but I have sung in Burgos and Florence,
Vespers in St Mark’s. My singing has made grown men cry.

I have not travelled on ferries, floating from one Greek
island to another, forgetting the name of the day.
I have never stroked a giraffe, nor given birth to a baby boy.
But I have picked redcurrants from the back garden, sharing
rich crops for over twenty years with small black birds.

In Ethiopia I have a son and I sat with him in his Physics class.
And for a few years I was a sailor, snatching a few hours
in Sydney, shopping in Hong Kong. I danced in a grass skirt
and flew across Alaskan glaciers with the man I loved.

Knitting – poem and writing prompt

1 Reply

 

bike-247394_1920 (1)

Photo credit: cocoparisienne via Pixabay

In this region, schools will start tomorrow. Everywhere, there are large white banners up reminding drivers that children are about, on foot or on their bike. For various reasons, I don’t have good memories of my time at primary school. When I think about knitting, or see someone knitting, my stomach contracts. But, don’t you love the bike?

 

knit-869221_1920

Photo credit: Foundry Co via Pixabay

Did you knit this yourself?

It would have been a morning.
Glasses, graying hair in a bun,
typical spinster teacher.

Why ask a question to which you
already know the answer?

Because you had never been able
or willing to show me left-handed knitting.

The few centimetres my mother
had added during the week stood out:

too smooth and regular, too clean,
easily done in her click-clack rhythm.

I watched you unpick it, leaving
me sitting with a pile of curly wool.

Prompt: Was there a subject that you disliked or even hated at school? Was it because of the person who taught you the subject? You may well have written a poem or short story about this already. Is there another poem waiting underneath?