Poems by the Writer as a Young Child

I spent part of my childhood on the west coast and in Grade 5 was part of an experimental 5/6/7 split. Lessons and assignments were more fluid and open than was typical in any other classroom I was in while growing up. Based on a handful of things I found in an old binder of “School Memories”, for English those assignments consisted of a checklist of things to do for the month. Directions for the March folder appear to have included instructions to write at least one poem about a pet. I wrote two, one free-form and one rhyming.

The free-form poem, My Cat, was about Spooky, I think, as he was the one more likely to exhibit some of the behaviours in the poem (Sam was less a lap cat in my memory), but some of it was completely fabricated. The rhyming poem, cleverly named My Dog to distinguish it from the first poem, was clearly about Alexander, the only dog we had while I was growing up. A lot of it was fabricated as well. I was not, for example, permitted to walk him on my own.

Neither poem was very good (horrible is a perfectly reasonable word to describe them both), but in March of fifth grade (so March 1981) I was ten, so expectations shouldn’t be high.

It’s possible these were the first poems I wrote. I remember, in a vague way, handing this project in at least to the point that I remember handing something in that had poems in it at some point during the school year, so it was likely this folder. There may have been earlier crimes of poetry, but I’ll probably never know that for certain. The likelihood of my finding any older surviving paper drops further into the infinitesimal range every day, especially since we’ve already done most of the clean out of my parents’ house.

What I do know is I haven’t found any other attempts at poetry until the high school poetry notebook that starts out on 05 May 1986, more than five years later. Some of the poems in that notebook aren’t bad, but a lot of them are only marginally better than the two attempts from grade 5. Until I dug out the Grade 5 English folder, I thought my career as a poet started there.

I’m not going to share those two poems here, sorry, as I’m a little leery of posting any creative work in the open at this point, even if I do put up a haiku (or variant) on some Fridays. They will find their way into something, but it feels unlikely it will be something for public consumption unless one of my children chooses to do something with my work after I’ve gone.

But you never know. Minds have changed before, even mine.

I’m just happy to have found them.

Be well, everyone.