It’s raining dogs and cats all along the east coast, with a cow-quaker warning followed by a goose fair morning. We’re getting soaked with drizzle and bored with all the mizzle. We don’t want a hurly-burly to get us out of bed too early. Why does the sky cry? She hung her grey clouds out […]
Category: Children’s Poetry
In which I nearly meet the Heffalump again
Down a dark hole, I was thinking about the different ways that I could get out, when it fell on me – it had fur and a snout – and said aloud with a Pooh-like air ‘A Very Bad Accident to Pooh Bear’. I called out ‘Pooh! I’m underneath you, trapped in a hole without […]
Star Fishing
Once upon a van Gogh night more colourful than day, a shoal of stars, disturbed, took flight, and poured down from the sky. I couldn’t find a little boat to row on the cosmic sea, nor did I have a fishing-net to catch some dreams for me. I tossed and turned on my pillow, and […]
Hobgoblin Shadows
When mother forgot to shut the curtains at night, outside the window the sulphurous street light invaded my bedroom and filled it with shadows of slippery hobgoblins with fingers so thin they could fit in my ears and burrow under my skin, squirm into the feathers that softened my pillows, and wait until I’d fallen […]
Childhood Goblins
Towers, chimneys and rooftops disintegrate in a colourwash of sunset and night’s ink drops spill into puddles of dreams, when children hear the goblins cry: “Come buy our fruits, come buy, come buy!” Curious thoughts enter little heads that lie in comfort on soft pillows, invade the safety of their beds, pull at the quilts, remove the […]
A South London Heaven
Across the football pitch on this side of the rails is wild fennel and long grass: a jungle for snails. There’s a wild damson tree, hawthorn and crab apples, where we lie, you and me, below leafy dapples. In summer there’s sunshine, in winter there’s snow; I love spring and autumn, when trees bloom and […]
Washing Line Blues
Although it is a sunny day the rotary drier is sad today and drooping on her zimmer frame when she should be spinning in fresh zephyrs of spring. When she’s all pegged out with pillows, and fresh, clean towels that flap and billow, dancing trousers, shirts and sheets, with grass and daisies at her feet, the […]
