Poem

Okay, in my continuing efforts to post creative work every day, here's a poem I wrote.

I think you should know I haven't written a poem since I was 21. And that was in the hangover of my angsty teenage poem stage.

I've an odd relationship with poetry. I used to love it, and then I went to university and it really isolated me from poetry. I started to feel it wasn't for people like me, that I didn't properly understand it because I couldn't analyse it well. And all that beauty and excitement I had felt about poetry - the massive emotional reaction I used to have to it, I sort of put it all away.

Recently I have started reading poetry again. Mainly because I have discovered some brilliant poets on Twitter and through friends, and because I started listening to poems being read on YouTube.

Anyway. I wrote this. Be kind, because I really, really haven't written poetry for a decade and the poems I used to write were appalling.

Poem:

We were the last

speakers of a dying language. 

Dead, now.

Our grammar will never be taught. No one 

will write our lexicon,

or analyse our folk tradition.

No one will record our songs.

Our tongue is lost to all but us,

and now we’re losing it too.

The news tells us that 

each year we lose twenty five mother tongues. 

But you and I know the truth.

The number is much higher than that.