For the next part in our series to support dyslexic learners at home, we look at the importance of multi-sensory teaching and signpost some resources from Dr Susie Nyman on using it at home.
Read morePoem Of The Week, Week 4: Lockdown by Audrey Ardern-Jones
For our last poem of this week’s Poem Of The Week, we have Lockdown by Audrey Ardern-Jones. This relatable sonnet reflects on the solemn and hopeful moments of lockdown-
Lockdown
It’s Easter week, Holy week, another week
of quiet, no aeroplanes overhead, an empty sky
waiting; days slipping into days in this unique
regime of silent streets where no-one passes by.
We listen to radios, stroll most mornings;
the dead are counted daily, numbers spin like dice across
the globe - a pandemic in crisis - messages spread
in seconds: words that pool in times of loss.
In our garden a blackbird sings, his yellow beak
opens wide like a chorister, he loves this calm;
a robin chirps in harmony, multiple magpies shriek
in voices, hey, hey, hey, loud as a burglar alarm.
The world’s on hold, our planet heals, cools down,
we long to dance again - live life in a fancy gown.
Poem of the Week, Week 4: I Slip into My Mother's Shoes by Jo Roach
Another poem of Poem Of The Week is I Slip Into My Mother’s Shoes by Jo Roach. With VE day approaching and the language used to describe lockdown in the media, this poem rouses a relatable mood -
I Slip into My Mother’s Shoes
and stand at the bench in the munitions factory
oil pours over my hands
the air thick with the choking smell of sulphur
my skin stained canary yellow
the deafening din of the machines
the clatter of metal trolleys
I run into the Anderson shelter
terrified by twelve seconds silence of doodlebugs
have all my teeth removed at the Angel Dentist’s
ready for an ill-fitting set of false teeth
take dictation in Pitman’s shorthand
type sixty words a minute in an office in Charterhouse Square
catch a Green Line bus for a day out
lift my skirt and go for a paddle by Southend Pier
dance down Oxford Street on VE Day
with men in coarse demob suits
I’m wearing an engagement ring
a ruby with diamond chips
I wait in the church and he doesn’t come
I go back to my baby son and one room.
Jo Roach born and brought up and still lives in the part of London where she can trace her mother’s family roots back to 1650. Jo’s father was from Ireland, a connection to place which exerts a strong influence on her poetry.
Poem Of The Week, Week 4: 'Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini' by John Mackinnon
For week four of Poems Of The Week we bring you John Mackinnon and his poem, Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini. Whilst the galleries and museums are closed to the public, perhaps this poem will conjure the imagery of the Italian Masters…
Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini
Madonna
If we are to be judged
it won’t be the bambino
sucking his finger and staring
vaguely heavenwards,
but the unlettered girl watching us,
not smiling, not unkind,
whose charged stance is the question
we won’t evade.
Circumcision
She urgently holds
her child to the knife.
His body shudders
as he takes on the law.
The old priest,
so careful in the act,
is all beard,
eyelid, eyebrow.
Jerome
He is reading a book
in a rock landscape
a face disfigures.
It frames the lit city
and the hills’ recession.
While the lion waits
he will lift God’s word
on the state’s stretched tongue.
Mackinnon states, …”recently I have been writing a series of short poems on paintings; the poems here relate to the National Gallery’s 2019 exhibition of Bellini and Mantegna and their permanent collection. I see a poem as an exploration of a territory opened up by some kind of form or material.” Mackinnon website is www.johnmackinnon.org.uk.
Poems Of The Week, Week 3: WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR by Chris Hardy
As part of week three of Poems Of The Week, we have WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR by Chris Hardy, a poem about ‘about memory, love, and loss.’ Hardy explained to Bell House that he, ‘…write[s] as a reaction to moments of sudden awareness, of time, the beauty and fragility of life and the world, a random memory, an overheard phrase. A few words appear and that is the beginning. I read poetry looking for the same experience.’
WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR
She might remember to tell you,
though she is busy
running the café.
Also she is young
and might not know
what we meant
when we told her how
we came here
and camped on the beach
before she was born.
We met fishermen,
a woman driving a bull,
the Chief of Police, children, and you
who’d once made pastries for Farouk
in Heliopolis,
and gave us coffee, water,
cakes and wine for breakfast.
We watched above the shore,
swam, picked up mail,
rubbed olive oil and vinegar
into our burnt skin, and waited for something
or nothing.
Something came –
work, daughters,
a slow accumulation of weight
to hold us in one place
and press us into shape.
Many others bought
your powdery confections,
spent enough to turn the track
into a road and line the fields with
shops, apartments and a gleaming,
arched Patisserie.
We didn’t knock to wake you
just now,
when we had to leave again.
But we told the girl our story
and if she tells you I think
you will remember us and know
what we came looking for
this time.
(‘WHAT WE CAME LOOKING FOR’ was published in ‘The Frogmore Papers’ poetry magazine and Chris’ first collection, ‘Swimming In The Deep Diamond Mine’. )