In Mrs Tilscher's Class

By Carol Ann Duffy

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
"Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.”
That for an hour,
then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweetshop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she'd left a gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone's nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared
at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown
the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

Comments : 21st March was World Poetry Day and a friend asked for poems on facebook, this was what one of her friends shared. I really liked the way the poem evokes images of school and the scatty wavering meter. - Zen
p.s. Links to some other lovely poems by Carol Ann Duffy given below :
Valentine - http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.in/2001/08/valentine-carol-ann-duffy.html
Prayer - http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.in/2002/01/prayer-carol-ann-duffy.html

The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009

By Carol Ann Duffy

Link to the poem here

Comments : This news article mentioned the poem by Carol Ann Duffy. The two lines that the article quoted about Obama were interesting enough to have me click on the link for the poem. Found the poem interesting enough to post here, read it if you want contemorary events sent up and critiqued in the format of an old old poem. - Zen

About the poet :
(from the NY Times) Carol Ann Duffy was named poet laureate of Britain on May 1, 2009, the first time in its 341-year history that the post - held by such poets as Dryden, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Ted Hughes - has gone to a woman.

Ms. Duffy, 53, is known for writing accessible, often witty poems on a wide range of topics, many of them to do with the minutiae of everyday life.