Functional Skills (Maths)

You’ll get questions in the test,

Where you need to multiply,
Or divide.
You’re allowed to use a calculator,
But you,
Will need to work out,
What calculation to do,
For yourself.

I've recently started a short course at OpenLearn called, "What is poetry?"

One of the tasks is to take a few lines of prose from a book and turn it into free verse by introducing line breaks to highlight what is important in the text. I took my inspiration from a Functional Skills level 1 Maths book.

World Poetry Day

Proclaim some verse to celebrate the day,
We should all have a go in our spare time.
Just have a bit of fun along the way.

Are you a Keats or Ernest Hemingway?
To leave such talent dormant is a crime.
Proclaim some verse to celebrate the day.

Compose a Limerick or Roundelay,
Though poems do not always have to rhyme,
Just have a bit of fun along the way.

And for the brave? The Rondeau Redoublé!
Though this could turn out bad or quite sublime,
Proclaim some verse to celebrate the day,

A sonnet, or blank verse, might be the way,
Will Shakespeare used to write them in his prime,
Just have a bit of fun along the way.

In Harlem, Langston Hughes and Claude Mckay,
Were treated as if poetry was a crime,
Proclaim some verse to celebrate the day,
Just have a bit of fun along the way.

©️ Graeme Williams 2019

I wrote this in a couple of hours for World Poetry Day. Some bits of it work well but I'm less pleased with other bits. It's a Villanelle of which the most famous is Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that goodnight". I will probably continue to work on it and any suggestions for improvements would be welcome.

At the Crossroads

What skills do I have?
What skills could I learn?
Could I build a wall,
Or go work at CERN?

What skills could I learn?
Could I learn to fly?
Or go teach those kids,
Who daren't even try?

What skills do I have?
What do I do well?
Could I run a team,
And make that team gel?

What skills could I learn,
To help me improve?
Could I spin a deck,
And make the room groove?

So where should I go,
And what could I earn,
With skills that I have,
Or skills I could learn.

©️ Graeme Williams 2019

This was the final assignment of the Futurelearn course and  I really struggled to know what to write. Eventually I went back to the idea of a found poem and based it on a conversation in an Employability lesson where students had to decide what skills they had for a CV. 

Originally I wrote it in the third person but found it worked better in the first person.

Sunday Afternoon

Snatches of music, the TV is on,
Unfamiliar voices,
A man and woman, talking in turn,
Taking turns,
Canned laughter,
My wife joins in,
Applause.

The front door rattles,
Footsteps in the hall
My wife talks to the kids,
Echoing,
Indistinct,
The kids reply.

The cat demands food,
Persistently, insistently,
Then scrabbling,
Claws on a wooden floor,
Children's laughter,
Then more meowing.

The cathedral clock chimes,
Quarter to the hour,
The kitchen clock ticks,
The cat purrs,
The children coo and laugh,
The sounds of Sunday afternoon.

©️ Graeme Williams 2019

"Sunday Afternoon" came about as another Futurelearn assignment in which we used our immediate environment as a source of material. It was suggested that we watch and describe what was around us. I decided to use what I could hear rather than what I could see so, in some ways, it almost became an exercise in mindfulness.

I've altered the order of the lines so that it flows better; the original list was a random collection of sounds as I became aware of them. Now it almost tells a story.

A Found Poem - The Oceans are Rising

Young people were out on the streets today
They came in their thousands to make a change!
From Brighton, to Brussels, to Montreal,
From Nigeria and beyond.

Thousands of children fight for their future,
“You older people, so stuck in your ways,
You just can't admit the damage you’ve done.
We need action on climate now!”

Ten thousand students occupied buses,
On London streets and Parliament Square,
They rise in the thousands with one demand,
“You must act on climate change now!”

Young people were out on the streets today,
“The oceans are rising and so are we!"

©️ Graeme Williams 2019  

A found poem is one where words are taken from other sources, whether they are overheard conversations, phrases that appear in articles, advertising or from the internet.

On February 15th 2019 students went "on strike" to protest against climate change and the apparent lack of progress made by governments world-wide. My found poem was created by taking comments from Twitter about the school strikes and turning them into a poem.

The image is a photograph of the UK student strikes taken by David Holt and published on Flickr. It is used under the creative commons license.

Homelessness

I wonder if you think it’s right?
A house where no one sleeps at night,
The windows dark, no sign of life,
While on the street,
In doorways, huddled out of sight,
The homeless sleep.


But this is all that some have known,
A mattress made of cold hard stone,
While standing vacant and alone,
Unoccupied,
A house that could provide a home,
That’s dignified.

©️ Graeme Williams 2019 
 
I wrote this poem after reading a newspaper report that the number of empty homes in England has risen for the second year in a row to more than 216,000 while, at the same time, there has been an increase in homelessness.

Two Writing Exercises

Before the Ballpoint
When I was young,
I filled my pen,
From a bottle,
On the school desk.

And when I wrote,
The metal nib,
Splattered the ink,
Across the page.

In the Workshop
Sometimes it feels like all I do is file,
(Not folders into draws and paper cuts)
But hour on hour of standing by the vice,
The careful push and pull of metal teeth.

The rhythmic rasping of the file becomes
Like gentle snores that tempt me into sleep
But still alert, I keep on with my task.
Sometimes it feels like all I do is file.

ⓒ Graeme Williams 2019

I've been working through a poetry course on Futurelearn. These two pieces of writing are based on exercises we were set. The objective in both exercises was less about producing a finished poem but more about getting us writing.  

Insomniac in love - Gus Ferguson

Amongst the pleasures
I have known in a long
and worried life

is to lie awake
and listen to
a gently snoring wife.

I've recently been taking a poetry course with Futurelearn which provides online courses. As part of my studies we looked at a range of different poets.  I tend to like short, humorous, pithy poems such as Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes so, one of the poems that appealed to me when I first read it, was Gus Ferguson's 'Insomniac in Love'. My use of it here is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 South Africa License.