Nana Ollerenshaw: Three Poems

The Teacher’s Aide

Warm, encompassing, but wise

to the ways of kids,

anything but distant

anything but slack,

“You can do it, Jack,” she said.

Ambitious for the best

the kids can do,

she asks them what they think,

wants to know what’s in the story,

brings them to the brink

of confidence.

A perfect reader Sophie’s brother

but doesn’t comprehend a word,

who, where, why and when?

What good is one without the other?

Sound the letters, let them flow,

if stuck come back again, another go.

A child struggles word by word

and finally learns the tools,

the flush of reading books alone!

“Hey mate, you sound great,” she said,

“a sticker for your sticker book,

a sticker to take home.”

Nana Ollerenshaw

Anaesthetic 

Clocks don’t stop.

Only the brain

fools with time

under medic anaesthetic.

Fear I’ve no control

the anaesthetist gently holds my soul.

It’s not like sleep or even coma.

The planet turns without me.

I’m in the Nothing

I imagine death to be

or in the void before conception.

So when my life comes back

operation done

I don’t remember it had gone.

They didn’t see.

The staff are wrong.

Nana Ollerenshaw

Treatment Stopped

My body now

its own defence

to show what it can do.

Chemotherapy withdrawn,

infusion, poles, recliners,

the drawback curtains gone.

All the hours run

the body sensing what’s to come,

to and from the city

done.

I come back to view:

“the night-side of a life,”

“the sure extinction that we travel to,”

postponed.

Nana Ollerenshaw