In honour of it being Hallowe’en, I’m posting a poem. However, it’s not one I wrote this year, last year or even remotely recently.
This is a poem written by my eleven-year-old self, so please bear that in mind when reading it!
There are a couple of things I’d like to go back and ask her, if I could, like what I meant by the diamond in line 3? But I like the sound of that sentence so perhaps that’s why I used it, and I like the description of clouds in the last verse.
Anyway, here it is, you can decide for yourself whether it’s a Trick or a Treat. HAPPY HALLOWE’EN!
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The witch who flies on broomstick
Flies to wake the dead
The diamond turns the dead awake
To steal the night away, away
They groan and grumble
Clink, and clank a scream
Death awakes, the scream again I hear
And in the distance hoots an owl.
The leaves crunch as foxes prowl,
Bubble, bubble the cauldron boils
The witch flies back to her haunt
To stir and stir, then away to soar,
The children who are not asleep
Waiting, waiting for the noises,
Bumps and bangs in the night,
The vampire bat flies out to hunt.
A storm blows up in the night
With clouds so grey they frown
And burst out crying with a wail
The toad jumps into shelter
As the troopers go past
A queer voice groans and the clock strikes
The first hour of the morning, they die
To their graves they flee.
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Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
That was very good young Kath! And it is obvious what you meant about the diamond. It was the moon or possibly stars bringing halloween – the witching hour :0)
I think you deserve a nice treat for that- ask @hmhunt for a cherry bakewell x
You’re very clever to see that’s what I meant. Thank you! That makes sense.
Helen very kindly let me jump the queue and the cherry bakewell was delish.
Well done to the 11-year-old-Kath! That was great. You drew on loads of stuff to create a perfect atmosphere. An there’s a real feeling that you were at home with poetry. Did you have a good teacher?
I didn’t.
It makes me really sad that poetry isn’t really bothered with enough in our schools
I was very fortunate and had great English teachers, including my mother, who taught me at middle school! My high school English teacher was fantastic but once told my parents that I was the class sponge, because she knew I was taking everything in but she couldn’t get a word out of me! Nothing’s changed there… 😉
I don’t remember being that at home with poetry. I think it was just a case of not feeling the fear that I definitely experience now when it comes to poetry. You don’t think about it at that age, do you?
(Just found a d on the floor. Must have dropped out of my last comment)
Nice save! 🙂
Oh gosh – it just flows at that age doesn’t it? Only gets harder later. I used to write things just for the sound of the words. I wrote one poem which began ‘Hath two horizons seen, two eyes two ends two figures in the pound.’ No-one knew what it meant and neither did I. But always fun to read again. Obviously you were going places.
Well, I haven’t got anywhere yet but I’m enjoying the journey a lot. I think as we get older we put more and more mental obstacles in the way of our writing, don’t we? When we were younger, we just wrote, irrespective of rules or conventions.
I love that line from your poem – it’s got a magical flow to it.
I thought I’d lost the ‘comment’ button for a while but now I’ve found it. That’s a very sophisticated poem your eleven-year old self wrote with some wonderful poetic devices; aliteration, repetition, assonance. You knew which way you were going even then!
Thanks Chris! … but how much do I wish I’d been that 11-year-old self facing careers advisors and teachers? I knew what I wanted to be back then! It didn’t seem like such a good option by the time I was 16 or 17. Ho hum.