Head of the River
Lowgill took me back
Seated near the Bowland brook
teased by runes of wrinkled shade
I was in class again
counted as one to whom no regard
was best given – dyslexic we’d say now,
shiftless then.
Nibs always bent, blots ruled okay.
Because I could not write, my heart hurt;
my backside too.
What saved me at school
were the high windows – square kites –
steadfast blue visited by white.
I understood Kent’s River Stour –
sailed my mind’s eye along it each day
from Westmarsh to Durnock.
If only they’d ask me to read aloud
its cordovan banks, hump-backed bridges,
slow cursive bends.
Paper words – second nature to my peers –
were rivers too, oxbow islands,
inlets with no landing stage.
Phil Burton from his book Too Young to Forget