Wide-eyed in wonderment

Circa February 1951 – the first poem
I ever wrote didn’t rhyme;
I remember being told so tactfully
at the time, and that it didn’t matter,
but I must have missed the implication,
to me it was useless blather.

Then our teacher got enthused and
gave eager praise, read our fledgling
verses aloud while we sat amused
or mortified or glowing proud; I suppose
it was to make us literate, encourage
confidence, engender sentiment.

I could read by then, and reading
was a source of greater pride to me
than writing rhyming words for her to
spout; I also found derisive comments
written in the lavatory a seeded lexicon
for use in writing better verse.

So don’t try and tell me that it didn’t
matter; course it did, she read easy
on the ears Janet & John crap with that
cat & hat & mat Dr Seuss stuff
thirty years before his time of tone
deaf and mind numbing verse.

Now I recognise it was all about words,
easing the hard symbols into reading,
but it left a bleeding legacy of tortured,
torrid rhyme that dogs us worse than
battered clichés, split infinitives, soulless
similes adrift and mashed metaphor.

I wonder what I am writing for these days.
I know it’s not for praise, or to be borne aloft by
vacuous comments, or rated in numerical
content by anonymous readers. I think it’s still
the same fledgling desire to be read aloud and
listened to breathlessly, wide-eyed in wonderment.
© I.D. Carswell