I’m half way through. I may as well get the free verse over with.
Free verse is the most difficult form of all, in that it’s piss easy to just ramble and bore the reader or listener to death. Good free verse that doesn’t sound like a half-drunk aunty relating the weird and faintly inappropriate dream she had last night is a rare thing.
You won’t find it on this blog.
What you will find is a long, rambling retelling of Johanna Spryri’s Heidi, and her metamorphosis (via Charles Trittern who wrote the toe-curlingly moral sequels,) from dark, curly haired enfant savage to blonde, braided model citizen.
I never learned my prayers
Kneeling beside my granny every night
She mumbled curses
I mouthed the words she spoke
Until she died. Aunt Diete took me in
Unwillingly, the neighbours told each other,
Who’d have the curse-child? The orphan?
Soon enough,
She wanted rid of me, marched me up
The mountain, double-dressed and sweltering.
I pulled my clothes off, danced
Like a she-goat on the crags
Hair curling wildly.
Impish, nymphish, heathen.
In the years that followed
I flourished on the alm,
A goatfoot boy taught me
The secrets of the mountain
My dear, fierce, hawkeyed grandfather
Taught me independence
And I thrived
On goatsmilk, air and nightly burning mountains
Until they dragged me
Screaming
Out of the sunset’s fire
And into town.
There starved of air
I guttered like a flame
Contained in stony streets.
But even as they broke me
I wrought spells upon them
Brought many plagues down upon them
Until at last, haunted and full of guilt
They exorcised my spirit to the mountains.
They sent me back with God and alphabets
Tainting the lovely chaos of my soul.
My fierce and wild grandfather was induced
By me, his little christian sleeper-cell
To beg forgiveness, leave the firey mountains.
The goatboy tied down, taught to read
And threatened into tameness
As I became demure and well behaved.
A wonderful example to us all.
My head of lawless curls grew straight and blonde
They braided me into a model woman.
They gave me husband, children and a home
Down in the village.
But the mountain’s fire
Still burns in me and one day I will dance
Up the mountain
Hair flying
The clothes they make me wear
Scattered on the alm for the goats to chew.
And then I will dance with the goatfoot boy,
Naked once again.
Tom Juniper Poetry 