Ellie G

I wrote this poem about the painful experience of waiting in the school playground to pick up one of my many nieces and nephews, amidst all the parents.

I might as well be a beacon
I might as well wear a flare
Ride in on a bike made of toadstools
With streamers attached to my hair

I might as well hurtle in screaming
With a couple of yoohoos to boot
And tear in and out of the classrooms
Looking for pencils to loot

I could spin like a dervish on mushrooms
While the parents are waiting in line
Talking politely and holding their packets
All of them punctually timed

I could puncture their neatly trimmed gossips
With a handstand or cartwheel or three
Let off a suburban wild rocket
With a whoop and a howl and a whee

For all of the good it would do me
To draw more attention my way
To My Way, the lesser known highway
The tollbridge for this one ain’t free

It’s cost has been etched in my skintone
The lines all amiss on my face
My youthful complexion, just ripe with rejection
And years worth of absent embrace

My skin might as well be a shade of
yellow and green like the rhyme
Of the girl who ate worms in the woods then
only just made it back home in time

She thought she would lay down and perish
And gasp a last breath in the trees
As they towered and flourished above her
Taunting leafy green oxygen breath

But she didn’t.
a nettled survivor
With help from a trunk and a branch
A squirrel, a songbird, a wood pigeon coo
That offered a timid romance

A life giving, raw second chance.

She rose, took a place in the queue and
Deep into the wild wind she leant
And waited her turn for the child that
Would never call her what she’d dreamt

And chose to walk out from the playground
In carriage of mettle and courage and grit
With hopes turned to ashes but piled into bricks
foundations of one more misfit