After a couple of years of attending poetry nights regularly, and listening to a range of poets from very well known to almost beginners, I've tried to learn a lot. Both in the way I deliver poems and how I write them. My poems are usually metaphorical, or allegorical, retellings of my own feelings and experiences, and the more terrible ones are buried deeper within the folds.
I've always felt that it's not much fun for an audience to hear your pain. But sometimes experiences need to be 'written out'. Especially when that is how you deal with these things. A painter would do it.
So, I did it. And wrote a poem about how my mum, in her final few days, mistook her death rattle for the sound of a bird. I allowed her to think that it was. At the end, her mum came to her, as did my late mother-in-law. The poem is called Little Bird, and I can't share it in its entirety as it has gone out for submission with several others. Hopefully it will fly.
A chance meeting today with Peter Pegnall, the poet who ring-masters these events, led him to tell me that it's good to be more candid. Not to hide so much behind metaphor. And that this will allow me to change and grow as a poet. I value his advice.
The little bird stayed another day
And another and into a third.
Until at that day's close
Her mother came...
