Cilla McQueen, New Zealand Poet

Hi there

Years ago, I read a poem in the New Zealand School Journal by the NZ poet, Cilla McQueen.  It's one of my favourites:

LEARNING TO READ -

I remember the look
of the unreadable page

the difficult jumble

& then the page
became transparent

& then the page
ceased to exist

at last I was riding this bicycle all by myself.

***

...and isn't that a lovely poem about a child learning to read?

above:  Cilla McQueen

The School Journal gave me another little gem, this time by NZ poet Sam Hunt, where he referred to a train tunnel as "as long as next term".  Now, isn't that an image?

Thinking about poetry

I'm beginning to think there are lots and lots of secret and not-so-secret poets out there in the big wide world.  I have two close friends who like writing poems:   A J Ponder (who already has a link on this blog, www.anafflictionofpoetry.blogspot.com.   And, of course, there's J, my swimming buddy, who wrote that lovely little poem for me about Coco my Wednesday dog, earlier this week.

Some lines from poems stay in your mind forever.  I well remember a poem of Sam Hunt's in the New Zealand School Journal many, many years ago.  It referred to a truly long tunnel that a child was travelling through.  Sam said the tunnel was "as long as next term".  What wonderful phrasing.     Then another School Journal poet (Mona Williams?)  wrote of a child discovering how to read.  She briefly mentioned in the poem how hard it was to learn to ride a bicycle.  The last line was where the child finally got the hang of reading and triumphantly proclaimed something like, "I'm riding this bicycle all by myself" ... beautiful!

I had a poem, too, in the New Zealand School Journal, maybe 100 years ago, called "Puffity Pom", about a fluffy cat.  When it was printed, the editors or printers (don't say typists - I used to be one, and I was fed up with bosses blaming everything on 'typos') missed out a line.  Darn!