Kate Williams

As the Olympics start in Japan, I’m delighted to be contributing… er, not to that, exactly, but to Brian Moses’s mini online Olympics poetry anthology:

http://brian-moses.blogspot.com

Leap, spin and sail through this entertaining collection, contributed by some of the UK’s top children’s poets! Perhaps they’ll inspire you to write your own Olympics poems, too! No one’s too young or old to have a go! Take an idea from the poems on show, maybe, and spin it at your own unique angle.

Here’s mine again, by the way: Wrong Jump (scroll down to view). As a one-time long jumper for my school, I’m glad to say I never did high jump by mistake. However, I did do other less than impressive things, like travelling across England with the team to compete against a posh and distant school, only to do 3 no-jumps (missing the starting mark). That was it: challenge over. Then came the great, grand tea, laid on by the great, grand school, as a reward for our ‘achievements’. Oh well, live and learn. Anyway, the cake was good.

Wrong Jump

I ran, leapt, swung up high,
over the heads of passers-by,
over the traffic, the lampposts, the wires,
the rooftops, chimneys, towers and spires,
the House of Lords, of Commons, Big Ben,
the top of the London Eye, and then – 

down I tumbled, bump-bump-bump,
to the gloomy boom of the judge: “No jump!”

“But why?” I cried. “I jumped to the sky!”
“Wrong jump,” he sighed. “This is long, not high.”

Kate Williams 
(Published in When Granny Won Olympic Gold, A & C Black)

PS: What do you reckon hedgehogs make of the Olympics?
Hedgehog Olympics – Payhip