'Hide and Seek' by Sarah Hermans This is something I wrote this morning when I woke up... Its a memory that has been sticking in my mind a fair bit this weekend, and originally I just wrote it down quickly so I wouldn't forget. But when I looked at it this afternoon it seemed to have some sort of rhythm, so, without changing the actual wording, I decided to experiment and see if I could make it a poem. What I want to know is, do you think this is poetry?
.
The Lady Died
Two o’clock that afternoon or perhaps
Two twenty five we played with an old Instamatic
In a man-made Eden surrounded by pavement.
You were Buttercup and a score of Enid
Blyton heroes I was
Jennifer Connelly searching for her brother
Before we realised how inappropriate Jareth was.
Nineties children with an eighties childhood.
A thousand pictures made only with air.
.
The day we drove in and heard the news on
The radio a five year old is caught up in fantasy
But not politically unaware
I hadn’t heard of her until then but
everybody knew.
And next to the slide that was
An entrance to an underground tunnel
A boy told me she had deserved it
Because her name was Di.
My parents made sure I
Never drove without a seatbelt and
I saw my first picture of her
In newsprint that afternoon I read
Sleeping Beauty and she became
Another fairytale.
A real life simple princess.
Unmarred by the unknowns of
Paparazzi and adultery.
Unhappy with palace life because
She had to leave the curtains
Partly open.
The next biggest news to hit the classroom
Was the breakup of the Spice Girls.
___
If not, what could make it a poem?
This weekend also marks the closure of a fair amount of festivals and shows I have been holding out to see, but unfortunately I have been stuck inside revising for mid-semester testing. Last weekend I managed to make the Linden Postcard Show before it closed this week. It made me wish I was not so incredibly broke at the moment.
xS
