Kate Williams

Summer is cracking its shell, pushing out at all sides; bursting to burst out. It’s prising open spring’s bulging buds, setting free the waiting colours and scents and petal patterns, stretching the soft stems taller, taller, and rolling velveteen sheens over hill and vale, as the sun (yes, sun – remember it?) warms up ready for blast-off… or am I getting over-optimistic now?  Well, it’s here for now, at any rate, and now is when I want it, to shine a light on my workshop prep!

Yes, it’s homework time, and summer is doing all my work for me as I saunter round the garden with my new topics. It’s sweeping boundless horizons around each one in turn: Sea, Jungle and Mini-Beasts. One after another, they seem to rise up and quiver in the dazzle, ideas flashing up conveniently at all angles. The idle hum of a bee… a glassy ocean, grows into the  menacing buzz of a jungle… rises into the haunting howl of some beast – jungle, sea, or mini beast, who can say?

A butterfly flits by, flake-fragile, dancing over the bluebell sky like a tiny sail on a vast sea; as for the garden, it seems to be growing visibly around me as I wade through new nettles and duck elongated, leaf-loaded branches, brightening, deepening, twining,  threading, reaching up the gate posts in sheer exuberance!

But perhaps tomorrow will be rainy: a day for sea mists and wave-whipping tempests; steaming rain forests and leaping tree frogs; and slug mayhem in the vegetable plot… boundless horizons indeed.

But all those are just my dreams and scribbles. How to get the children dreaming and scribbling will be my next question, but already the possibilities are bubbling up in the blaze, so I’d better stop this and try to catch a few with pen and paper!

Please see Workshops page for more details of my poetry sessions for schools.

Kate