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

 
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