the sky is yours
I have joined a short poetry course for mothers, ‘Writing through motherhood.’
I am looking forward to five weeks of listening to poetry about motherhood and childhood, of writing for myself too, of being supported and prompted by the course leader and the other participants, and of making time for thinking and connecting,
I recognise some of the ways in which motherhood has nudged and changed the course of my thinking, the ways in which I relate to others, to the world, to myself. I think the time to explore this creatively will be exciting and will help me discover… something. Although I’m not sure what.
The group is friendly: several new mums, some more experienced; several with careers in writing already, others here to try something new; several, interestingly, with some sort of education/ teaching career or background.
We read and responded to the poem Close to the sun (for a child, not yet three) by Imtiaz Dharker, from her book ‘Luck Is the Hook’. …, which included the line ‘the sky is yours.’ This was a possible starting point. The hook. The jumping off point into our own line of enquiry.
I wrote to my son. Eleven years old and just about to fly off to new adventures at secondary school.
But I also, later, connected the phrase with my PGCE students, just about to fly off to be fully-fledged teachers, with a class of their own from September. (See, there is that ready-made bird analogy for me to use). Excited, scared, full of trepidation, as well as pride in how far they have come. They are ready. I remember a colleague one year revealing to me that by the summer term these PGCE students will no longer want to be back on campus with us learning HOW to be a teacher, that they will be eager to be back in placement, in their schools, with the children, BEING the teacher. This is right. This is how it should be. This is perhaps when our job (of giving them the starting points of their journey) has, to a lesser or greater extent, been done. I want to say to them, on their final PGCE course day, ‘the sky is yours’.
Here is my finished poem. To my son and my daughter.
The sky is yours