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.

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.