The Poetry Bus and the cheeky halves...

I'm off out Montrose Music Festivaling here this weekend (see last post) so I'm putting my homework up now. Bill set us a really fiddly task this week!

First we had to find or write a sentence. I was reading this book:




so I took a sentence from its first page. The book, by the way, was a birthday present for my Mum (for her last birthday in April this year). Mum was a big fan of Rose Tremain and asked for this, her latest novel, after reading about it in her favourite 'Independent' newspaper. When it came to it Mum was already ill by her birthday and not up to reading the novel but I did start reading it aloud to her once I realised there probably was not going to be a time when she got her reading eyes and brain back. Even reading aloud didn't do the trick though - she just couldn't concentrate on more than five minutes fiction at a time once she was unwell, plus the book was kind of gloomy for a 'final days on this earth' scenario. In the end I gave up on it and switched to reading her selected articles from the paper and bits of Shakespeare (she loved that – she shared Shakespeare's birthday and always was a fan).

Once she died the book 'Trespass' just kept looking up at me though (and calling out 'finish me, finish me'). So I did. It's dark and brooding and all about people in families who treat each other badly - I quite enjoyed it.

Anyway, the sentence I picked for the exercise was this one:

Mélodie is ten years old and she's trying to eat a sandwich.

Once we'd chosen our sentence we had to cut off its second half and give it some new endings. Here are a couple of mine as example:

Mélodie is ten years old and she is hungry.
Mélodie is ten years old and her feet are sore.
Mélodie is ten years old and she likes the feel of music.

Then, with as much extra fiddling as we liked, we were to make the new endings into a poem. I didn't change much about my new endings...at first I tried to get a poem from just the new endings but that was all a bit flat so I did add a little word here and there. Here is the poem I came up with (and at the moment managing to produce anything at all feels like an achievement). I fear I am losing my sense of humour a bit and I kind of hate poetry too just now. I suppose this all will pass...or not.



Mélodie

she wants to find a book that tells her everything
why she is hungry
why her feet are sore
why nothing ever happens
but no-one is listening to her
and the globe, as always, seems small in her hands

she likes the feel of music
to swim in sunshine
the sound of Russian
a slip of solitude
she knows what passion is already
left to herself, she'd drink jam from the jar


RF 2010

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