Poems and preschoolers

With two young children at home, it often feels like there is no time for writing. Yet, making hurried notes to myself on my phone has sometimes been a small sanity-saver, reminding me that there is beauty and worth in what I’m doing with my kids, and also that there is more to life, and to me, than being a bottom-wiper/tidier-upper/toddler-referee...

The point of the notes is that they might eventually prompt poems. Often they are cryptic and ungrammatical, jumbled together in juxtaposing clusters. Perhaps these would be interesting poems in themselves? Example: ‘Mary played the marimba. // Boy sparrows bellow from rooftops. // Pitch for a parents’ cookery comp. Sestina??’

I have made some forays into harvesting from these notes, with varying degrees of success. One of the less successful was a poem about seagulls. Coming back to it, weeks later, the note seems like a better piece of writing than the poem that came from it. 

Seagulls

Outside a flock of seagulls kerfuffle, congregating on the pavement outside our neighbour’s front wall. The boys watch. The little one is momentarily lifted from his teething grump to giggle and lift his hands to the fluttering whirl of wings passing the window. The bigger boy asks why we can’t hear these birds singing. I realise that we can’t hear them, only the electronic squawk of one of the educational Christmas presents; ‘square!’, ‘square!’, ‘square!’. Although, the toy’s got an accent and pronounces it ‘squeer!’, to the two-year-old’s endless amusement. I tire, quicker than the children, of the feeding frenzy in the street. Opening the front door lets in the seaside sound of squabbling birds, as incongruous in this suburb of Durham as it was in the school playground in Bristol. I find a discarded box of fish and chips by the neighbour’s driveway. It goes to join the pile of nappies in our bin. I return to the house, where the sounds of squabbling have now taken up residence.