Читать книгу Just Where You Left It... and Other Poems - David Roche - Страница 15

My palms are sweaty, my mouth is dry.

There is the stage. I ask myself why

Do I have to do this? It’s not fair

To force scared boys to read up there.

Standing alone, when it’s your turn.

No text to read, they make you learn.

The first boy up is a nervous wreck,

Just stood there on the burning deck.

Parents to right of him. Parents to left of him.

It’s all too much and the room starts to spin.

The next boy comes on. Will he be all right?

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…”

“That’s much more like it,” the audience is thinking.

The poor boy spots that his father is winking.

His mum starts smiling and nudges his brother.

“I did this at school,” says the amnesiac mother.

“In fact, I’m sure that I won first prize.”

Matilda told such dreadful lies.

The next one’s modern and nobody knows it.

They can’t comprehend but nobody shows it.

They prefer verses they learnt as a child:

Iambic pentameters, not text running wild.

“Dulce et Decorum Est…”

The old ones really are the best.

I’m next.

And I’m scared.

There’s parents and teachers and sisters and brothers.

The judge seems quite nice but then so did the others.

They’re always just so damned condescending;

They like your beginning but prefer your ending.

“Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo.”

(I’m desperate for the loo-oo-oo.)

I’m up on stage and I know I don’t know it.

I can’t even remember the poem or poet.

I’m unable to start - my mind is quite hollow.

If I get the name then the rest just might follow.

Was it Kipling (Rudyard) or Byron (George Gordon)?

Was it T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden?

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…”