Jude Brigley

Jude Brigley is Welsh. She taught English for forty years and loved every minute. She always believed that poetry is at the heart of the English curriculum. The Poetry Society named her a Poetry Teaching Trailblazer in 2008. Her PhD thesis was on teaching poetry. She has written various articles and text books but now retired is concentrating on creative writing.

Jocundus

They say their former teacher

never showed them a poem,

as they look at ‘Daffodils’

with curious suspicion,

as if it were a creature

tossing its head to bite or

startle with a glancing

sprightly movement.

I ask them to think

about how they

would walk in a garden,

or walk in nature

beyond the vale and lake.

Adeel jokes that he would

run with his football

but is admonished by Shen

who makes paper

animals and leaves them

as gifts. The boys are pensive

waiting for a guide to dance

them through the margins

of the poem to the bay

where the inward eye waits.

They understand solitude

and the mind lost in thought.

But still the poem is a wary friend.

They wait for the host to open

the door to the stars where each

word twinkles and floats to bliss.

Encore

Teachers can be artists,

who as they perform

adapt like jazz improvisers,

creating their own beat.

Eleven Plus

On Sunday evenings, my mother set me mental,

while she soaked in the bath. My brain teased

to please her and on Mondays after school

I caught the 10 past 4 to Llan to be coached

by a famous rugby referee: to know words

like abundance, philatelist and beehive apiary.

I never did know my nine times table, but

I could work it out in the margin. On the morning

of the result my name was in the Western Mail.

My mother told me on the stairs that I had passed.

It seemed like an end to a film but it was only

the beginning of measuring, weighing, judging.

Grammar School was only a home-made rosette.

Aspiration another synonym for breath.