11 April 2013

Day 10 - Three Swans and Inside Your Head

Photo: Sally Douglas


The Three Swans

Inside my head
there is a black-eyed swan
with bones of steel.
Its feathered palms
beat words
from the air.

Inside the steel-boned glass-eyed swan
there is a paper swan:
razor-edged,
made by a prisoner in a tower
from his very last page.

Folded inside
the paper swan’s sharp angles
are all the words
of all the birds
in all the world –
and a perfect tiny drawing
of a swan.
.
 Sally Douglas



Today's poem is a bit of a cheat, as it's not new. The real poem for Day 10 will have to now be Day 11's.

This poem is part of my as yet embryonic collection of poems for children. I started writing poems for children when I was running a poetry club for Years 3,4, and 5. I was creating all these exercises and workshops for them, and of course, giving them a test run first. This poem came from a workshop I called 'Inside Your Head'.

We started by reading Miroslav Holub's poem 'A Boy's Head', and then went onto an extract from Luke Kennard's 'Wolf on the Couch' (The Migraine Hotel, Salt, 2009). The children were amazed by the surreality of Kennard's description of what was in his speaker's head: an owl, which 'appears to be made up of a network of tiny cities'.


‘And all the people in these tiny cities,’ says the wolf, ‘do they run for buses when the owl is wet? The men with their black umbrellas, the women with their Nancy Mitford novels held over their coconut-scented heads, the light in the city like an old grey ice cream?’

‘You’d need a microscope to see that,’ I mutter.
 
The children then followed these guidelines to create their own poems: 


Now, think:

What are the things inside your head? Animals? Objects? Impossible things? Dreams? Wishes? Fears? Worlds?

Brainstorm on the board the types of things people might have inside their heads.

Now have two minutes writing your own list of things that might be in your head.

Choose the ones you want to write about – perhaps two or three, or perhaps all of them – and start writing your poem.

Possible starters:

Inside my head…

I looked inside my head…

I spy behind my eyes…

‘What is in your head?’ asked the …..
 
And I have to say, some of the poems they produced were very good!

Any educators out there are welcome to use or adapt this exercise for their own use.

4 comments:

  1. cheddar cheese, maybe-inside mine :-D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well there's bound to be a poem in that! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wonderful exercises that treat children as the artists they are born to be :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Sali. They certainly responded to this one. I was amazed by the ideas they came up with.

    ReplyDelete