The Wide Awakes

I keep a couple of favourite poetry books close to my bedside in case I get what I call, The Wide Awakes. During the worrying time when I was the main carer for Stephen’s mother in her last years, I did become prone to bouts of insomnia. It was a quite dreadful time and I found it all most stressful. Actually, she had lived with us in our present home for well over twenty-five years and lived in the adjoining cottage before we moved here.  While she was well, it wasn’t that difficult, although to be perfectly honest she never did like me. In her last few years when she was so dependent on me, instead of softening her attitude as I increasingly did everything for her, her resentment hardened and she treated me more like a servant than a daughter.

 

A long course of acupressure over the last few years did improve the sleeping pattern enormously, however I do unaccountably get, The Wide Awakes, maybe once or twice a week still. There is no mistaking the difference because I am WIDE AWAKE. I get up and make myself a cup of cocoa and then sit and read some of my favourite poems or maybe write a poem in one of my many notebooks that I have all over the house ready to grab for a spell of scribbling, or I might write out one of the poems I my trying to install in my memory banks to hold forever. When I am learning a poem, I think it essential to practice it aload, but also I like to test myself by writing the current one down and then checking it.

 

I have been having a devil of a time trying to learn Keats lovely poem Bright Star, which is a bit unusual for me, but I think it is that it seems to have several changes. I have now got there with it and my last test was to write it as fast as I could starting with the last line and working my way back to the first line before checking it. It all sounds a little OCD doesn’t it.

Learning that, has been a hundred times harder than Ozymandias by Percy Shelley that I absolutely love and the pattern makes so much more sense to me.

 

One of the books I keep by the bed has a poem for every day of the year and I notice that Ozymandias is there for October 12^th. The one below, I read to my husband after I had read it on 26^th September because it made me smile. It was written by Ade Hall.

 

It is called:

Astrophysics Lesson

 

I took and orange and a plum

To demonstrate the earth and sun;

Held in place by gravity---

Our little planet, you and me.

 

I grabbed some grapes for all the stars

And cast them out so wide and far;

Distant suns and foreign moons

In all four corners of the room.

 

The wonders of the galaxy

Spread out before class 2BT

‘Where did they come from? someone cried;

‘From the fruit bowl’ I replied.