To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’

The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe. This was last week, by the way. (Ha. Only kidding.)

‘When you start seeing a second wave, it’s time to go home.’

The second poem concerned the rather humdrum and repetitive activities of a spider attempting to climb up some sort of drain, and its setbacks occasioned by inclement weather. I can’t say that these rhymes commended poetry to me. I would have been better off with something more relevant to my situation as a recently weaned infant living in an unjust patriarchal society, instead of tall stories about misguided tiger-hunting expeditions and dreary Sisyphean arachnids.

This stuff occurred to me lately because I have been teaching my 14-year-old daughter about poetry. It’s all part of my ‘Smash the Teachers’ alternative syllabus for lockdown — which has also recently involved a module entitled ‘How the British Empire Brought Decency, Democracy and Wealth to a Billion Grateful Natives’. Her papier-mâché bust of Sir Cecil Rhodes is coming along fine and I am looking forward to her essay ‘-Exploding Three Modern Myths — the Gender Pay Gap, Structural Racism and the Climate Catastrophe’. I see it all as a counter–balance to the stuff she is taught when the teaching staff have bothered to turn up to school.