I wrote this poem after taking a workshop with children
who were writing poems and stories about witches,
wizards and things-that-go bump-in-the-night.

I was surprised by how hard line the children’s views
were, not only on the use of magic powers, but
also on what the ordinary people living in tandem
with these often malevolent entities, did in response to
them.

The children were extremely hard line!

STORY TIME

Little children tell stories of things
They know by instinct.
Nothing shocks them.
They know wickedness and knowing it
Both makes and breaks its power.

Little children laugh at those
Who would deny witch and wizard.

In their stories, the poor man who steals the cows
Has good reason to be out in the dark night.
‘The man needs the cow,’ they reason,
‘Because he has no money
And his children will die without milk to feed them.’

Smiling,
They lock the old witch under the stairs.
She won’t see the light of day again.
But they allow her cow to burn the poor man’s fingers
And are glad that her punishing spells
Turn his eyes to mud.

© 2025 GWEN GRANT

   OH, LOVERS

You never should have fallen in love,
Never touched those lips with your trembling mouth
Nor mingled your breath with a breath not your own,
Until, breathless, you were brought down by desire.

Blinded by love,
Your eyes burnt out
By that implacable face staring at you,
Pulling you down
With its deadly understanding
Of your sick passion.
And you, refusing to see it mocked you.

There was always some confection of delight
Waiting to engage you.
Some new trick to disarm and enchant you. 
A decorative something
To hold on to. To plan.  To cling to.
As well put a snowflake on hot iron
For nothing could save you.

Lovers are lost
When one lover no longer loves,
And the other lives on yesterday’s passion.

                                               © 2018 Gwen Grant

 

THE SOLDIER’S HOME

The soldier’s home!
Filling the house with khaki and brass buttons,
Coming in the dead of night
By the street light,
His boots banging on the roadway
Making the darkness jump.

We heard the mouth organ first,
Dancing its way through closed doors,
Skipping up the stairs
Tapping its melody on the scrubbed wooden floors
Until it was sure we had all woken.

Behind its music trickling into freezing rooms,
Covering the icy beds, making frosty pillows,
He came in, brown as a berry, burnt by foreign suns,
Calling for company and not very welcome.

War breaking out on every bedside,
Pulling covers away from frozen bodies,
Laughing, ‘Wakey! Wakey! Rise and shine.’

‘Give over. Stop it. Go away,’

Until a voice called crossly.
‘That will be quite enough. Stop teasing them
And all of you come down!’

Almost too much to ask
When the bitterly cold linoleum
Snapped off all our toes.

And so we woke into this icy frosted morning
Shouting joyfully into khaki and brass buttons,
Into heavy boots and the much loved face
Of almost a stranger,
Into the music of his mouth organ,

‘The Soldier is home! He is home!’

©2025 Gwen Grant

THOSE WRITERS!

Writers are always certain
Those they write about
Don’t know what has been done to them,
Don’t know and wouldn’t care
If they did.

The writers are wrong.

Those captured people,
Old ghosts returned,
Some happy, some furious,
Have a deadly understanding
Of what the writer is about.

Lifting their voices in complaint,
Shaking writers’ cold shoulders,
Awakening them from stolen dreams
When they should have been sleeping,
‘Leave the dreams alone, pal,’
They know.  And one day
They are going to come back
To haunt them.

Serve those writers right!
Capturing people’s souls without permission.
Caught for ever in a remorseless
Circle of bad and good.
Caught for ever in a circle of helpless love.

                                 ©2021 Gwen Grant.
PRIVATE KEEP OUT!  by Gwen Grant
published by Penguin Vintage  Children’s Classics
available in paperback and as ebook

One of the flowers I loved when I was a child was the Buttercup.
There was a meadow where we played which was bright yellow
in places with buttercups. This flower often faced a lot of
opposition but it somehow always managed to bloom. In what
seemed to me to be the foreign country of Kent where I was sent
for a year to get well, there were plenty of buttercups to remind
me of home..

TAKE A LEAF

What we see
In any flower,
Is a determination
That come what may,
Nothing will stop them
Blossoming
In Spring.

Even if they
Have to create
Their own Spring
To blossom in.

©2025 GWEN GRANT