The following poem was written by my grandson, Connor, just before his 13th birthday last year. He needed to write it as a school project, on a subject for which he had a great interest and he has been an avid bookworm from babyhood:
Hi, my name is Connor and my poem will be about reading. In my opinion reading can cure all of my problems and I feel that I am set free whilst reading.
Descending through the arctic ocean
Salt burning your eyes
The pressure building
Your lungs expanding and contracting
Screeching for air
You’re
Floating, sinking, drowning, breathing, choking, living and dying
All at the same time
Finally, the pressure’s too much
Your heart stops, lungs collapse
You die
And everything stops
But it’s not over
You can feel your pulse bulging through your neck
You feel something in your hands
You look down
Only realising now that you weren’t there but only looking
At ink on a page of a book.
You pick up another book, skip to page 248
Then
You’re running through a damp forest
Foreign noises surround you
The cries of pain by your comrades
The snarls from the raptors
The sound of your feet squishing the moist earth
And all in a mere two and a half chapters
Gaining and gaining
You smell the rotting pieces of flesh
You’re gagging and stumbling
Finally, the dreaded moment comes
You make the crucial mistake
Of looking behind yourself
And you fall
Then they catch you
Bite you
Scratch you
Tear at you
Until you’re barely alive
Wait, aren’t I reading?
These books
These stories
Can save people
Transport them to a place they can only dream of
You be what you want
Who you want
When you want
Where you want
How you want
You’ve just gotta let go
Be free
I do what I want and need
I’m freed
When I read
With such speed
How I plead
For more time to read
These books
Create figments of my imagination
That I can think of for days on end
Reading trillions of books a month
Millions of books a week
Billions of words a night
Every night my books all beg me, “please read me”
As they argue for my affection
These books
Make me who I am
They make me who I aspire to be
They make my choices and decisions
They channel my thoughts
Flow in and out of my mind
These books make me
They make me
THEY
MADE ME
The Magic Roundabout 