Poetry Becomes a Covid Casualty

It seems that poetry has become a casualty of Covid 19. Schools are being advised they can drop poetry from the GCSE syllabus, at least for the next 12 months. What a shame! Children are natural poets. They are uninhibited. They express their thoughts and feelings as they find them. They love rhythm and are fascinated by word play. They don’t just read poetry – they write it.

I know this as the mother of a child who wrote poetry from the moment she could write. I know it also because in recent years I have been reading the poems submitted by children to a poetry competition, a competition named in memory of my daughter, Megan, who died of cancer ten years ago.

Summer poems

This year, the children, all students at my daughter’s old school, the Stephen Perse Foundation in Cambridge, had been invited to submit a poem on the subject of summer. Little did they know when that choice was made that the summer of 2020 would be a summer like no other.

One of the winners of the Megan Young Poetry Prize is a boy named Frank Olsen Milne. He was a Key Stage 3 pupil when he wrote the poem – which makes him around 12 years old.

Quirky

This is Frank’s entry. I love the humour, the quirkiness, his decision to approach the subject from a different angle. And I especially like a first line which makes me sit up and take notice.

Flying in Norfolk

I haven’t read many poems about summer

at least if I have

I can’t remember them right now

and maybe the whole idea’s a bit cheesy

but if I was going to write a poem about summer

I would want it to be as cool

(and by cool I mean hot)

as the kind of things that only happen

when it’s not spring or autumn

nevermind winter, that’s far too dark

and not big daisies, clear skies and long sun

no, not that kind of thing

but that weird burning sensation

when you take off your socks on a beach

that’s definitely a summer thing

and chasing your kite over dunes

after you’ve stupidly broken the first rule of kite flying

by letting go

only to watch it soar into distant pine trees

as you race across gorse and bird poo

to save it

like it was the last bird on earth

or clogging up the Kindle with sand

much to everyone’s delight

or staying indoors when you are supposed to be out

and playing someone else’s piano

and talking with wood pigeons on the state of things

and learning air-force slang in a concrete dome

or tracing a green cone-shaped spiral shell

through the graveyard of the shell museum

that just can’t be open in winter

though hot chocolate drowning in cream and marshmallows

that might as well be there all year

and speaking of marsh, there are the birds

who must be glad when the humans

are all over and out

Frank Olsen Milne