Year 9 Girls Study Poetry – Read Their Work!

Ms Korn, English Teacher at St Margaret's Hampstead

This term, Year 9 are studying modern poetry in English. Our students have started by exploring Carol Ann Duffy's poetry, focusing on themes of childhood and memory, and learning the new techniques and effects of caesura (a pause in the middle of a line of poetry) and enjambment (the continuation of one line of poetry into the next).

This week, pupils were tasked with creating their own poem entitled 'Before you were mine' in the style of Carol Ann Duffy. We we feel exceptionally proud to share with you Violet’s poem about her mother. Great work Violet!

Before you were mine
Long before I arrived, you are walking
Through the red door of St Margaret's, lost
In a sketchbook in the Art room. Now I sit
In the same stool's shadow, my fingers stained with paint,
Where yours were too, years before I was thought about.

Away from St Margaret's you're in your bedroom
With Isobel from up the road. Just two girls
Laughing with their dolls. Your cats curl across your knees,
In a house that hasn't heard my footsteps.

I look at your old sketches, the lines a bit faded
From a time when your only job was to be you.
You didn't know then that the red door would stay.
While you traded your quiet afternoons 
For the busy, noisy life of being my mum.

Now I walk through the same red door,
Past your school picture hanging on the wall.
You're frozen there, cross-legged and unsmiling 
In a hallway you haven't shared with me yet,
Long before you left that frame 
To be mine.