A schoolgirl’s exercise book

This past week I’ve been transposing most of my poetry from the exercise book and album Mum had kept.
I say most as some of it is so terribly dire and naff, it doesn’t make sense, just rhymes for rhyming’s sake and a final line that ruins the whole thing.
As I did with my Scrapbook in the cottage, I can and may rewrite some of those.

Photos:  the mini album from 1984 and my exercise book from 1971

However, what does come across is that I was a rather lonely teenager, with the usual hopes and dreams of love, marriage and having a family, yet through verse, something always got in the way (usually my love interest dying) of making my dreams come true.
Some of them I can actually remember the circumstances, a thwarted romance finding out the guy was already engaged to be married, another when everyone else seemed to have a boyfriend and I didn’t, so I assumed there was something wrong with me, and of course the one way street where my feeling weren’t returned.
My imagined love affairs and passion were charmingly naive, but there was an underlying hint of an abundance of love I had to offer and share with the right person.
I also seem to have passed through a phase about writing about sailors, but this was years before I corresponded with someone in the Navy, and as far as I know I had no nautical relatives!
They are not all sad, sorry tales though, a couple being amusing in a teenager sort of way.
What has also struck me is that although written some 46-47 years ago, some could easily relate to experiences with drunken boyfriends, cheating partners and lying chancers from my adult life, and I wonder if I was actually preparing myself for love’s disappointments in all its shapes and forms ‘just in case’!

I attended a poetry course in 1974 where I was told that I could write verse, but not poetry.
I didn’t really understand or appreciate what was meant at the time, but since starting my blog and reading other people’s wonderful writings, I have learned so much and am still learning. Some of the abecedarian pieces I’ve penned have surprised me to the extent that I can hardly believe I wrote them. Of course there are such beautiful images available to illustrate my thought processes which aids to impact my efforts.
With the photoprompt challenges I participate in, sometimes I am inspired in verse or poetry format rather than the standard form of writing. It’s one of the many things I love about the blogging community, the flexibility,  dexterity and encouragement of personal thought, ideas and interpretation.

Photo: extract from exercise book

I remember years ago Mum saying she’d found an old book of mine and read it regularly.
Sis once said there was a book of my poems by Mum’s bedside. The book I’ve been working from is probably it.
Photo: extract from album (poems Dream and The Next Generation have already been published some time ago in my blog as they were in my Scrapbook)

I’ve kept my 1984 entries in a separate file from those of 1971. The latter has 20 pages in it, most with two to a page, some with three.
I wonder how Mum compared those of a teenager to the ones I sent her over the past five or six years. It was one of the reasons we put together a book of my poems for Bro in NZ and Mum for Christmas 2016, though to be honest I don’t know how many Mum read.
Sis said she’d read some of them herself, so I guess Mum did too, or maybe Sis read them to her. I hope so, as there were a few written especially for her and my Dad.

 

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