By Mia Sutherland, Year 12 2018
When I was young, with chubby hands as small as tea-party saucers, I would visit my grandfather. And while he and my mother talked I would run circuits around his garden.
Past the rhododendrons, the small maple sapling and around the cherry tree which would, in summer,
rain cherry-blossom petals of joy which rested as freckles on my milk soft skin.
And in my grandfather’s garden there was a quiet wooden cross marking the resting place of a golden-
ruffed corgi,
his favourite. As well as two stone ducks which I liked to imagine broke their rock shackles and came alive on a crescent moon.
Some things to notice about this poem
This poem elicits a childhood memory of a person and a place.
Mia draws us in to a child's point of view with the running in circuits, the naming of the trees, the buried dog (linked back to her grandfather) and finally the stone ducks who are part of an imagined magic. The language choices enhance the child-like (chubby hands, tea-party saucers, milk soft skin)
This poem was written during a Saturday class with our tutor, Jess Fiebig. It appears in WRITE ON 51
© The School for Young Writers and the poet, 2019.