10

Poetry

Before lunch the next day, while Rachel Flanagan drove to St? Mary's to pick up Hartley, Tom sat at his desk and wrote the first and last poem of his life. He did not know why he suddenly wanted to write p-try - he never read it, barely knew what it looked like, thought of it as the sententious verse he had been made to learn in the Junior School. 'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said,/This is mine own, my native land!' His own little terrace of lines seemed so unlike real p-try to him that he did not bother to title it. This is what he wrote:

Man in the air, do you fly by your own wings?

Animals and birds speak to you

and you in the air understand them,

Football, magic, dreams trouble

my mind, cards tackle other cards

and scatter in a valley.

Man in the air, were you that bird?

Who magicked himself away in dark?

Man in the air, father me back. Now,

while you and I and he have time.

Two years later, when he struggled to produce an assigned p-m for Mr. Fitz-Hallan's junior English class, he found that he was unable, even if he tried to follow Fitz-Hallan's advice. ('You could begin every line with the same word. Or name a color in every line. Or end every line with the name of a different country.') He pulled the old p-m from his desk and in despair handed it in. The p-m came back with an A and the comment in Fitz-Hallan's cursive hand that This p-m is sensitive and mature, and must have been difficult for you to write. Don't you have a title? I'd like to put it in the school magazine, with your permission.

Under the title 'When We All Lived in the Forest,' it appeared in the winter issue of the school magazine for that year.