Fledglings

[ladyteazle]

Nesting in your chairs you
stretch half-starved
necks to be fed
a can of worms.

Early from birth
you distrust our sort but
now you are cuckooed
in my tree. We begin.

And it really is quite a thing. Because
once I show you how to
swallow and slurp the
strings of words, you

don’t choke as much as you
did . In fact you can
chew the cud and
spit your guess
onto the page making

sense of the masticated
mess. With alphabet
soup you spell your
own answers, show me with
pride, spot the .

link. And I say:
to water I have led you,
and see - I told you
you could think!

[TDF]

hello m'lady,

I enjoyed this a lot, especially the choice of imagery. I get a lovely sense of young children being taught the basics of language, from those cutelittle chairs and tables they have. The choice of language and references is a clever one I think, the balance is good there.

The opening stanza is a strong one, a nice example of what I like about this poem.

As an ex-teacher, I also loved the second stanza - could relate to that image. And again it's well written I think.

I'm not totally convinced by the stanza breaks, I'm not sure I really understand why you chop sentences in half as you do between some. Is it to reflect the process of the children learning to understand, decipher and construct grammar?

swallow and slurp the
strings of words, - lovely example of your great use of roll and alliteration.

chew the cud and - like the image, but don't think it relates to the bird analogy being used very well. Think this is a misplaced metephor.

pride, spot the . - is this "." a typo or meant to be read as "full stop". I'm not sure I get how you intend for that line to flow into the last stanza.

to water I have led you, - The structure makes this seem a little prophetic or grand to me. Think I would just prefer "I have lead you to water" - more down to earth.

I liked the ending, nice and simple.

Enjoyed this, grats.
Tom

[ladyteazle]

Thank you so much for your feedback, Tom.

Will rethink 'chew the cud'
The full stop after 'stop the.' is a typo! How did that get there?!
And lol about 'to water I have led you' being too prophetic and grand! I have made the same comment today on some else's poem and failed to spot it in my own. You are spot on. Thanks.

Will rethink line breaks too.

So from a current teacher to an ex-teacher, once again, many thanks.

[TDF]

my pleasure, look forward to any tweaks. Bare in mind it's only my opinion, maybe wait for a few more before you tweak...

and grats for still being a teacher, better man..er woman.. than me!

Tom

[David]

A good idea well executed, lady T. I think I agree with all of Tom's recommendations, but I second his appreciation as well. Nice work.

Cheers

David

[Milu]

Heh, I'm a student at the moment, so I can relate in an oppisite way to TDF. I like the way you used a can of worms to represent ideas, that was very cleaver. Your style of splitting up mid sentences reminds me of Marianne Moore's style :http://www.hearts-ease.org/library/cont ... ore/1.html. I personally have a preference towards splitting up sentences line by line, but your style is your style. Thanks for sharing.

[ray miller]

I second everything Tom said, thought this was really quite excellent though if it were mine I'd call it a can of worms. Who would have imagined Northfield as a breeding ground for poetry? ray

[ladyteazle]

Well ray, you needed to develop an imagination to survive Northfield!