Natural Born Poets.

by Clare

As I walk into the school, she greets me – not with a “Hello” or “How was your journey?”, but with a stressed “So what do they need?” She’s talking about her class of seven- and eight-year olds, and I’m ten minutes late, though I’ve been driving flat out for three hours. No slow start or cuppa for me, because 29 children are waiting, and within five minutes they’ve told me that poetry is like a piano but with no music, and we’re talking about how our senses are our body’s way of telling us about the world around us, and inside us - and a little girl tells me she feels sadness in her eyes, and a little boy says he feels it in his arms.

It's the first of eight poetry classes I’ll teach over the next two days in North Cumbrian schools. I teach with half an eye to the National Curriculum; an eye to the school’s requests; and another six eyes to the kids. Today, I’ll working with children aged between four and eight. Do you know, I ask all of them, that until five hundred years ago, there were only two seasons? Winter – which came from an old word meaning “time of water” and Summer – from an even older word meaning “to burn, or be on fire.” It was five hundred years ago that we started talking “the fall of the leaf” or “spring of the leaf”. We think briefly about the magic of words: how having the words for something is like bringing it into being, and I ask them – if Winter is a time of snow and rain, what is spring a time of?

And this is how they answer.

Year Three

Spring is a time of soft flowers

and perfume,

Spring is a time of rabbits,

A time of sunrise,

of orange and yellow skies.

Spring is a time of lifted spirits

and blossom.

A time of chicks hatching

and birds singing.

A time of fresh starts, of happiness.

With the very small kids, we think some more about the meaning of “spring” – bouncing and jumping – and we talk about lambs and seeds and our feelings leaping into life. And though we know that not all poems need to rhyme, we agree that rhymes are good fun, and repetition is a great way to order a poem – a fishing net to catch a fish of words – and together we write.

Year One

Flowers spring –

birds sing.

Leaves spring,

children sing.

Sun springs,

doorbell rings.

Rabbit springs,

robin wings.

Flowery, leafy,

growing things.

I’m in Carlisle today, which is the birthplace of John Foster, the author of this poem which we read together:

It’s Spring

It’s spring
And the garden is changing its clothes,
Putting away
Its dark winter suits,
Its dull scarves
And drab brown overcoats.

Now, it wraps itself in green shoots,
Slips on blouses
Sleeved with pink and white blossom,
Pulls on skirts of daffodil and primrose,
Snowdrops socks and purple crocus shoes,
Then dances in the sunlight.

Some of the children have heard of personification; some have not; some are thinking about other things; some are picking their noses. It’s an area rich with Saxon and Viking history, so I tell them about kennings and alliteration, and I show them my extraordinary elbows and shivering shoulders. Then together, we imagine what Spring look like if it was a person, and what it would do and bring and say if it visited school, or the park, or their house.

And we look up how to spell onomatopoeia, and laugh about the big words we use to describe poetic devices, and how, whatever they are called, however they are spelled, we all use them, all of the time. Simile and metaphor, sibilance and syllable; iambs and trochee – when we talk with our friends, when we argue or sing - because we are all, every single last one of us, even the little fella with the mullet who won’t stop shouting, or the girl who won’t whisper a word even when I sit with her and her head is close to mine, even the teacher who didn’t say hello – we are all of us natural-born poets. Just look.

Year 4

Spring speaks with the voice

of the whispering wind -

take your coat off, she says,

Easter is coming.

She has braided brown hair

and her dresses are bright

with blossom.

Her skin is rough like a leaf

and she smells of dandelions,

fresh air, wet earth.

She lives in a cabin in the treetops.

There are flowers, everywhere.