The Grandlings sit one on each arm of your favourite chair,
You tell stories and sing songs.
Squeaky childhood voices learning and playing and imagining.
The world the whole world is open to their amazing minds.
Then one day they are too big to sit together
On the arms of your favourite chair.
So they fight to take it in turns.
Fighting for ‘their’ side and a lot of ‘Hurry up Nana!’
Then that is too squeezy.
The chair is wobbly and the arms askew
So you buy a sofa.
And you sit in the middle, and you read and sing.
Then they are tall and fidgety and spread out
So you get a bigger sofa.
And long legs wiggle and
Dangle and hang upside down.
Then one day one lies on your bed with You Tube
And the other on the spare bed with Twitter.
And there you are, in your now rickety arm chair.
Rocking and rocking alone.
I love this poem. That’s what happens with children 🙂 — Suzanne
Thanks Patricia!
I like the phrase “The Grandlings”….never heard that before but knew instantly what it meant.
I also like “They fight to take it in turns” and “rickety arm chair”.
One suggestion: work on getting rhythm into your lines. Not rhyme, but rhythm ( poetic meter ). Even free and blank verse must have rhythm.
For example, in your first line, “The Grandlings sit” sets up a 4-beat rhythm (tetrameter). The next group of words follows beautifully: “one ON each ARM”. Then the pattern changes + the line becomes hard to read:
The Grandlings sit, one on each arm [ “of your favourite chair is a 5-beat pentameter + throws off the rhythm ]
I like that you reflect the children’s growth by using the armchair image. I also like the YouTube and Twitter references.
Marg yes I’ve joined a poetry workshop group and hope to make the improvements. I appreciate your feedback very much, and yes my grandlings are growing and changing but still awesome, Cheers Vick
I’m so touched by your writing, Victoria. It’s so real. You made me imagine that one day, I could be rocking that rickety chair, and rocking alone.
Thank you Louis, I have more on my own blog, https://victorianorton41.wordpress.com/ Cheers vick
it really nice
Thanks Joy!