Learning To Read

 

Words abandoned me

When I were at Primary

Didn’t make sense no more

Like when me Dad and me

Made up stories

And created crazy characters

Like Fezzypeg

Who me Dad said were a cat

That owned a record shop

And talked and walked on his hind legs

And though I couldn’t always keep in mind

Everything I was told at other times

And I fell over

And I couldn’t catch a ball

Or decipher those clock hands

Or handstand or cartwheel

Or skip or do claps

Or cat’s cradle at all

And I got lost

Walking down a straight hall

I always understood

All the colours and the waves

And every word’s shape

They stretched towards me

Surrounded me and I heard

And from the stories I spoke

My all over the place head held tight to

Every syllable

Every sound

Illustrations never sketched

Sentences never written down

But with pencil pressed into tiny hand

Or open page etched

With uncrackable code

I couldn’t do it

And they said I were thick

It didn’t make any sense

Those hieroglyphs and squiggles

That tidy typed scrawl

Arranged in tidy lines

They wouldn’t turn into words

And colours and sounds

No matter how hard I tried

And I tried

I really tried

I watched me feet when I were running

Practiced claps and cat’s cradle

And kept me eyes on the ball

Until I realised

That maybe I were thick after all

Now time has passed

And people pay me

For my words

For my colours and my shapes

For my sounds and my waves

For my poems and stories and songs

So maybe

Just maybe

Them teachers was wrong