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Poetry Mondays: All Saints

Posted on by amystoryteller

Today being All Hallows Eve, tomorrow must be all hallows, or all saints’ day.  The church will be celebrating the lives of the saints: Christians who have lived and died before us.

Here’s a performance poem that I wrote quite a while ago for a primary school assembly on all saints’ day.  It was performed with props and bits of costume which had to be put on, picked up and thrown down again at high speed, adding to the silliness – but, hopefully, it makes a memorable point by the end.

St Peter was a fisherman, he fished the whole day long,
When Jesus asked him questions, Peter got the answers wrong,
When they said he followed Jesus, Peter swore it wasn’t true!
If St Peter is a saint, then we can be saints too!

St Paul was an unpleasant man with just one thing in mind:
To hunt down and to murder all the Christians he could find.
Yet he’s the one that Jesus chose to send his message through,
If St Paul can be a saint, then we can be saints too!

Saint Matthew was a taxman who stole far more than his share
Everybody hated him and said he was unfair
But Jesus said “Hey, follow me”: Matt stuck to him like glue
If St Matthew is a saint, then we can be saints too!

St Martha was a fusspot, and when Jesus came to stay
She wouldn’t sit and listen to a thing he had to say,
She squabbled with her sister as she tried to cook the stew –
If St Martha is a saint, then we can be saints too!

None of us is perfect, we don’t always get things right.
We lie and steal and misbehave, we argue and we fight.
But Jesus says, “Just come with me, and I can make you new,
I did it for these saints you’ve seen – I’ll do it for you too!”

LightCraft

Posted on by amystoryteller

Every year round about now, I start to see posts all over social media discussing and debating the issue of Halloween: what to do about it, whether to embrace it, what its roots really are and whether it’s a bit of fun or a terrible problem for society in general (or for teenagers, children, the elderly, people with special needs, people with allergies and so on, specifically.)

This year, we’ll be celebrating All Hallow’s Eve with a LightCraft party.  Children from our four churches will gather to play games, make light-related crafts, carve hearts and pictures into pumpkins, and hear that Jesus is the light of the world who has defeated darkness.

That’s on Sunday, so we might also go meet-and-treating on the night itself.  Meet-and-treating is a fun way to turn around the traditional tricks and scares while still being generous: we go out to find trick-or-treaters and hand over a treat.  This year we’ll probably give away glow-stick bracelets along with this explanation printed onto cards: it’s one that I wrote several years ago, and you are welcome to print copies yourself if it’s useful.

Nobody really knows where the festival of Halloween originated. The name comes from All Hallow’s Eve, marking a time in the Christian church when we remember saints and loved ones who have died, but the traditions that take place come from much earlier pre-Christian times. In fact if you look at almost any culture in any time, you’ll find that as the nights get longer, a festival takes place which involves light, intended to ward off darkness and evil. That’s where Jack-O-Lanterns come from, for example. It’s humanity’s way of dealing with darkness, death and the things that frighten us as we go into the long winter.
In our family, we remember at Halloween that Jesus said “I am the light of the world”. He has already conquered darkness and death by dying and rising again. This year, we’re giving out Glo-sticks to light your way and to remind you that Jesus has beaten the darkness!
We hope you enjoy your treats, and have a safe and fun Halloween!

Poetry Mondays: Half Term

Posted on by amystoryteller

This week is half term, and today we happen to be in a place with a dodgy internet connection, so for Poetry Monday I leave you with these few silly lines that I woke up with a few days ago. Happy holiday if you’re having one!

Lines upon waking on the first day of half term

O, first day of break! O, ignoring the time!

O duvet immoveable, pillow sublime!

O silent alarm, O husband all snores,

School run, where’s thy sting? Where thy power, O chores?

O slippers, O dressing gown, tea in my cup,

O magazine, O – oh, wait. The children are up.

Poetry Mondays: Words

Posted on by amystoryteller

Welcome to my first Poetry Monday!

Every Monday on this blog, I’ll be sharing one of my poems, perhaps with a few tidbits about how it came to be written or what I’ve done with it since.  Some of the poems will be new, but others will be things that I move over from a different place on the internet – a place I’ve moved out of – and put up on the walls here, to make it feel like home.  This is one of those.

It’s called ‘Words’, and was inspired by a single word prompt.  If you haven’t seen much of my writing yet, you will discover I’m fond of those!  You’ll also discover that I love playing with different poetic forms.  This one is a sort of kyrielle, but it’s not very strict one –  for example, the refrain is only half a line long where a true kyrielle would have a whole line, and it’s repeated more often than necessary.  Some might object that, because the punctuation changes, it’s not a true refrain; but for me, the joy of repeated words is to tease out as many different meanings from them as possible.

Why not have a go at a Kyrielle – or a version of one – yourself, and leave a link here?

Words

Words work for me, my employees
A quarter of a million strong
buzz round my head like swarming bees
as I direct: words, work for me!

Words work for me, I send them out
to fill each story, verse or song
Some I make whisper, others shout.
They wound, move, heal. Words work for me.

Words work for me: all except one,
the master to whom I belong:
and every word beneath the sun
Cannot explain Word’s work for me.

Many hats

Posted on by amystoryteller

I’ve always had a thing for hats – literal or metaphorical.

 

I’ve never had a short answer to the question, “So, what do you do?”

Even my tagline has three different occupations – writer, storyteller, ventriloquist.  But it’s not that simple, because I’m not the sort of writer that sits down and writes a novel.  My current to-do list is urging me to complete five different writing tasks for various clients and purposes, and that’s before you count the writing I do towards my own performances, or consider the writing I might do to use in an assembly or family service as children’s worker.  It’s also before you count the times that I do attempt to write a novel, or a resource book, or a poem.

Nor am I a storyteller with a single repertoire.  Although a large amount of my telling is biblical, and that is reflected in the books I’ve published so far, my work with schools tends to be traditional tales and my most recent storytelling project was local history.

As a ventriloquist, things are a bit more straightforward, but even there I have three distinct voices and characters apart from my own.  Evidence that I’m making a career out of splitting myself into as many parts as possible.

So I tend to answer that “What do you do?” question by saying that I juggle hats.  Or that I wear too many of them.

This new site and blog is an attempt to stack some hats together.  In fact, I nearly gave it ‘Hatstacking’ as a title, but then I reflected that it would be likely to get no visitors apart from a handful of confused milliners.

I don’t know whether it will work, or even last (I don’t have a great track record with new blogs) but I hope you will stick around and find out with me.  I do have some ideas and even a vague sort of a thing which could be called a plan if you really pummel it into shape.  So, wait and see?