My Mum and the Flower Here’s a new poem I’ve written: My Mum and the Flower My dad said that my mum had some secrets. ‘One time’, he said, ‘when she was a girl at school they said that it was ‘Harvest Festival’ and all the children had to bring in flowers. ‘Well, remember,’ said my dad, ‘your mother’s family ...read more

The Child Who Was Wild Once there was a woman, a young, young woman She ran from the city, the old, old city She ran to the woods, the deep dark woods She wasn’t seen for days. Days, weeks and months. She came out of the woods, the deep dark woods She came with a child, a child who was ...read more

Poems & Emotions We’re used to thinking of one kind of poem being about feelings and emotions – love, sadness, mourning, hope and so on. Think of one of the most famous poems in English, the one by Wordsworth that begins, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’ Straightaway there in the first line is an emotion-feeling word: ‘lonely’. Another tradition ...read more

Here’s a simple way to build a poem or a rap: collect words from the street. What you do is write down the names of shops, buildings, stations that you see. You add in the kinds of ads that you see up in the street, stuff to do with ‘buy this!’ You make up a chorus about walking down the ...read more

People often ask me for tips about writing poems. I always say that the best and simplest way to think about writing poems is first to read some poems. Then as you read say to yourself ‘I could write like that’. When you think about those words ‘like that’, that means you could write a poem that sounds like that; ...read more