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.

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.