If you listen, I'll tell you how it began,
My knowing that Poetry was part of me,
What made it so.
A classroom full of children,
a huge, old desk and chair, and we
that sat, you know
in silence, spellbound. An old Teacher
with War-scarred fledgelings at her knee...
....so long ago...
A clock ticks in the silence,
The old Teacher looks over her glasses at me
and seems to know
how I feel when she reads the poems.
She knows that I feel the same as she...
....so long ago.
The room becomes my Imagination
full of priceless treasures; a Princess I can be
if I wish it so.
Such poems of magic and wonder
throw their Spell around us tighter, and we
sit wide-eyed, you know.
Such deeds and dreams we
never had known....but I always see
whenever I go
to take up my pen, then start to think back
to my Teacher, her poems, and how, to me,
she was beautiful, you know.
by
Shirley Frances Winskill 1992
