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