A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.
Monday 17 November 2014
New poem: Prompter
I was on a bus when two people sitting behind me
started to talk to me. I said I lived nearby. They said
they did too. I said that I had lived here when I was
young. They said they hadn’t lived here long. They
had met while they were doing a play. I asked them
if they were actors. Oh no, they weren’t actors. They
were just in a play. Well, said one to the other, you
were in the play and I was the prompt.
‘Really?’ I said, ‘did you do prompting every night
when the play was on?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
Then the other one said, ‘And then we were in another
play and she had a part and it was me who did the
prompting.’
‘Did you ever have to actually prompt?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she forgot a line to do with the
radioactivity of a toaster.’
‘And one night you forgot something too,’ she replied.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said back.
‘Yes, the thing with the man next door who used to
do weightlifting.’
‘No, when you prompted, you dived in before I said it.
I was trying to do a new pause.’
‘I don’t think you’d have got to the right words.’
‘I would have. I know I would have. I know what I was
thinking. You don’t.’
‘I think you think you know what you’re thinking - which
is a different matter.’
‘There are times when I would like to have a prompt,’
I said.
It was that moment in the day in winter when the lights
of the shops start to be brighter than the light outside.