Books I Was Raised On

30 Poems in 30 Days: Day 8 (2) 

The list poem of my life was so difficult that I almost abandoned it and tried another tack. So I've got this list too:

Andersen. Grimm.
Gifts from my parents.
The boy with a splinter of ice in his heart.
The two sisters, Snow White and Rose Red.
(I wanted to look like Rose Red.)

Dickens, Dumas.
Gifts from my grandfather.
Dashing D’Artagnan and the brooding Count.
Nicholas, David and Pip surviving to happiness.
Sydney Carton nobly giving his life.

Jane and Rochester,
Cathy and Heathcliff –
forbidden passion, dark romance
alongside Anne Shirley and Little Women’s Jo –
girls who were real, girls who wrote.

James Elroy Flecker
and Rupert Brooke
Grantchester versus a foreign field,
Yasmin and the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
Kipling and Stevenson’s Kim and Jim.

All the plays
of Bernard Shaw
heart-rending Joan, feisty Eliza.
Wilde’s sad Happy Prince and hilarious Ernest.
A Secret Garden and a Little Lord.

Hardy and Housman,
then at last
Eliot, Pound and lyrical Yeats.
Miller and Synge and Eugene O’Neill.
War and Peace. The Rains Came.

Judith Wright.
Gwen Harwood.
Five Bells, or a Magic Pudding.
The Seventeenth Doll … and the Spring of my life
turned into Summer, a new story.