Friend E-Book

Kate Clanchy

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

I text you how much it hurts not to see you. Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain and growing up. About all the things that poems are always about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving, they are also immediate – they go straight to the heart like a text from a Friend. Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: some students' poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times. A donation from the sale of this book will be made to the charity Asylum Welcome.

Leseprobe

Also by Kate Clanchy

Novels

Meeting the English

Poems

SlatternSamarkandNewbornSelected PoemsThe Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)England: Poems from a School (ed.)

Non-Fiction

Antigona and MeSome Kids I Taught and What They Taught MeHow to Grow Your Own Poem

Short Stories

The Not-Dead and the Saved

In memoriam Joan Clanchy (1939–2020),who gave her life to education.

Friend,

Yesterday I saw a dog

that was you, long and rude. It had your short fringe

but didn’t wear the clothes you do,

second hand skirts that look like gold on you

and dirt when I borrow them.

Do you remember the days we almost died

together lying in the middle of rural roads,

gravel on the back of our heads?

Do you remember the taste of vegan ice cream

I pretended to like and my conversations

with your mother and brother claiming

I came to Burford just to speak to them and not

to watch you smoke out of your window

listening to 5am owls and laughing till we peed ourselves

while trying not to wake up your grandmother

with our underlying dementia in her. I remember.

I text you how much it hurts not to see you.

Your tattooed legs, your obsession with things

that make me uncomfortable, the £1 sprays

we both smelled of and the ramen we’d make.

Friend, do you miss the words we shared drunk

and upside down, our heads symmetrical, hanging

off the bed? Friend, do you miss the truths we’d tell

each other in churches where I muffled my breath?

I miss the 74 clocks that would tick in the walls

and tock to let us know that the friendship

we ate together would be something

we’d look back to in quarantine.

Aisha Borja (18)

Contents

Introduction

The Life and Times of Bedroom Floor

I didn’t come from

My Dog

Bookish

Places to Cry

Year 7

Resolution

Tent

Friends

Mad Bull

Eraser

Learning English

Sham

My Spelling

Friend

Vsst

Joke

People Pleaser

OX4

Ode to my Ceiling

in between the cracks

My brother

Sister

Back

Aunt

Mum

Grief

Grandfather

Grandma, at least

The Place I Once Called Home

Wish

My Lonely Does Dressage

Mingy

Silence has its imperfections

Lexicon of the Mountain River

Full Length Portrait of the Wind

Zero

Moon

Geography

The Sea Refuses to be a Sonnet

Day Trip

Rain

I took God with me camping

When all this is over

To Live

For My Future Lover

Romance

Boars Hill

You say nothing ever happens

Boys

Still

Love

Icarus

Love

I love you back

Long Distance Relationship

Goodbye

Sundaes on a Sunday

My bed broke up with me

Stained

The hair you brushed is being cut off

I always never wanted to be an adult

Equine

My heart is a cockroach, caught in the mouth of an alley cat

The Most Romantic Thing Ever

When I Was a Kid I Waited

I’ve learned to go back

Sister

My Mother

Want

My mother tells me she cannot

Mother of Flip-flops

The Child Under My Ribs

Dad

Lyndon

Mother’s Day

Ode

The Heart in Winter

Covering Freud

Exam Questions

Appointments

One of me is writing again,

My Teacher

Grown ups

To Do at Uni

Today

Note

What I Miss When I’m Away

The Story of this Book

The Poets

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Aisha wrote the poem ‘Friend’ during a poetry workshop on Zoom during the Covid lockdown of spring 2020. We were all frightened and lonely – that’s why I’d gathered my old students in the first place – but as soon as she read out the poem, I was transported to the close bedrooms and reckless feelings of teenage friendship, and so was the rest of the group. The truthfulness and clarity of the poem made us feel less alone.

I started to think of other poems that could do that trick – could keep you company, actually seem to take you into the mind of a teenager. Many of those that came to mind were also by my students, and I thought I would like to group them together. (There is more about how I came to know so many teenage poets, and about the poets themselves, at the end of this book.) So, over the coming months of quarantine, I started to dig out those poems and remind the poets – many grown up now – about them. When they were read as a group, the poems seemed even better; they supplemented and argued with each other, creating something greater than the sum of their parts. It was clear that this was an anthology. And so here, still called Friend, it is.

The book begins on a fourteen-year-old’s bedroom floor, and ends with a new university student looking back to a similar room. In between, we visit the sea, stand in the rain, grieve, repair, fall in love and out again, and give our families – especially our fathers and mothers – a long, cool stare. None of this is new to poetry, nor is the underlying theme of the book: that youth passes. The difference here is that these poets are not looking back at their experiences from age, but writing as these feelings freshly happen. Their poems have an immediacy and directness that is like talking to a friend. I hope many people, young and old, will enjoy their company.

Kate Clanchy MBE

The Life and Times of Bedroom Floor

On his floor falls his schoolbag, his tie

and his trainers, his phone with its charger

and three missed calls. On the floor

the detention he may have forgotten to go to.

(His mum’s gonna kill him for that.) He lets it all

fall, and him saying this, and her saying that.

He throws down the test he had to redo, the one

that he actually tried on. He puts down

the person he cares so much about.

So much, they’ll never know.

His whole world lies on that bedroom floor,

and everyone says it looks like a bomb hit it.

Nell Peto (14)

I didn’t come from

the right side of town, warm hands

on the walk to the school, a phone to check

in the middle of class. I didn’t know the difference

between lunch and dinner or tea and supper or why

a meal was better if it came from the stove not the microwave,

why it mattered if I could figure out the area of a triangle, that stealing

was always bad even if you didn’t get caught and that cigarettes weren’t

meant to burn your fingers when you held them

I didn’t come from a bedroom all to myself

WiFi that worked past 5pm or clothes that hadn’t been

worn before, I didn’t know that homework wasn’t optional

that you had to say please and thank you to everyone even if

they were a good for nothing teacher that didn’t even understand

that sometimes you were late because you had to

wake up your mother and make sure she remembered

to take her tablets and brush her teeth and you had to brush

your own teeth with a toothbrush made for giants that had green

in all the wrong places and tasted like pennies and disappointment

and the adverts always said it made everything ‘minty fresh’ but

the other kids laughed when you spoke

so you stopped speaking altogether.

Maisie Crittenden (19)

My Dog

I talk to my sleeping dog.

I stroke his cold, hard fur

through my fingers. I tell him

the stars are looking out

for everyone at different points

in your life. I tell him my heart

is a rushing lion, a cheetah,

and a cat all running at the same

time but at different speeds.

I tell him people are born

every day, die every day.

I tell him birds squawk

and cats meow. He starts

to twitch his eyes, dreaming

something no human could

possibly live through.

I tell him that my life is a seed,

waiting for water.

Jamie Allport (12)