The American poet Mary Oliver suggests that ‘a reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars’. I like this comparison. Something stirs within us when we read a good poem. The experience often enables us to feel, taste, hear, think and see in altered ways. Perhaps it is the compression and intensity of a poem that speaks powerfully to the listening mind. Perhaps it is the pattern on the page with its various line breaks and verse paragraphs which gives visual assistance to the reader seeking to ‘hear’. I think Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he described poetry as ‘the best words in the best order’. My advice to students engaging with poetry is to ‘listen’. Don’t try to work it out. Let it come to you. And even then, many poems refuse to give up all their secrets. This inability to be known completely brings the poem alive and invites the reader into the power of mystery and human creativity.

Last week I wrote about the advantages of imitating good writers and the benefit in using their words to create something new. Ms Boss’ Year 12 English class did just that in one of their lessons this week. They are currently studying the work of the Australian poet Robert Gray. I have included two wonderful poems written by students in Ms Boss’ English class. The first is a poem by Jasmin Williams entitled ‘Lost in Light’ and the second poem, ‘Painting of Late Ferry’ is by Abby Luyton.

Lost in Light
Leaving now, I watch from the dark
Beyond the sound of touches on the snare drum.
Beyond the street lights’ fluorescence.
Ceaseless activity.

The plunges of night
Tremble down, nervously
About in the blackness.
To be lost soon
                        Amongst a blizzard of light,
The city loses sight of the d…

Jasmin Williams

Painting of “Late Ferry”
The wooden brush
From a balcony in the night
Dark water
That ceaseless activity. Uniting and dividing.
Trembles nervously, hands
Drawn along spectacular choreography
The projector’s beam
Beneath the city,
The ferry like tasting honeycomb
Filled with its yellow light.

Abby Luyten

In March of this year, Grace Roodenrys – a member of the Mount Carmel graduating class of 2018 – published a poem which deals with climate grief and hope. I have included this below.

This month I am twenty,
which means that twenty times
I have watched the flowers bloom 
on my father’s magnolia tree, 
twenty times
I have weathered this miracle 
and wondered how many might be left. 

When others were younger
the world could have saved itself. 
When others were younger
the future must have seemed an endless garden: 
beating of wings, babbling water, 
a wide, kind, shimmering place. 

Still, I wasn’t promised negation. 
I was promised freedom – 
weren’t you? I was promised life, 
was given language, was shown the poem 
and pointed to beauty and told 
both could achieve so much. 

It’s difficult, now, to imagine this. 
The poem feels mute 
in a world that winces at a mention of itself, 
beauty impossible in a century 
that has its eyes sealed shut. 

In late Winter the magnolias glisten, 
they hold the light like something they love, 
and I think, I am twenty. 
For much longer will I have 
a name for hope?  
Wasn’t I once trusting,
Wasn’t I once tender, 
Wasn’t I once promised so much more than this. 

Perhaps parents, teachers and students could select key words from Grace’s poem and create a new one. If you’d like to share your poem with me, please do so.

Mrs Clare Murphy
English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach